Health campaigners, with the support of Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and backed by the cheque book of the world's richest man, used the platform of Davos today to launch a $56 billion programme aimed at saving 14 million prople in the next decade from dying of tuberculosis.

"Every 15 seconds, someone dies of tuberculosis," Mr Brown said at the World Economic Forum. He promised to put support for the plan on the agenda of the Group of Eight industrial countries finance ministers meeting in Moscow.

Mr Brown yesterday announced that the UK would provide an extra £41.7 million for anti-tuberculosis drugs in India.

The Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis would, if implemented, meet the UN’s Millennium Goal of halting and then reversing the spread of TB by 2015. But the plan faces likely funding needs of $31 billion (£17bn) to meet its lofty target.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft multi-billionaire, has committed his Gates Foundation to tripling funding against tuberculosis to more than $900 million by 2015. "Although it is almost eliminated in rich countries, it’s still one of the biggest killers worldwide," Mr Gates said.

Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the most TB-afflicted continent, also urged business and political leaders to back the programme.

The plan aims to improve access to treatment, develop the first new TB drugs in 40 years as well as a vaccine to replace one in use since the early 1900s.

Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the Stop TB Partnership, said tuberculosis had afflicted humankind "since at least the days of the Pharaohs" and was thought to have killed 1 billion people throughout history. Despite the availability of affordable, effective treatment, each year there are 9 million new TB cases and nearly 2 million TB deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation.

Stop TB says the first phase of its campaign, which ran from 2001 to 2005, more than doubled the number of people placed on the so-called DOTS treatment strategy and helped India and China -- where TB is widespread -- spot nearly 70 per cent of TB cases.

The heart of DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course) intervention is to have careworkers closely monitor a patient to ensure that he or she completes a short course of powerful drugs.

Analysts said the funding shortgap of $31 billion was a key factor, especially at a time when there are looming health threats, such as avian influenza, that press heavily on budgets. Unlike AIDS and malaria -- the two other great killer diseases of our time -- tuberculosis can be quickly and cheaply treated.

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