July 4 (Reuters) - The Siberian region of Tomsk has nearly halved the number of people dying each year from tuberculosis (TB) since 1999 through a set of clear, simple steps.

These steps, which a group of U.S. doctors called Partners in Health (PIH) helped impose, are now being exported around the world.

The following are some facts on the Tomsk project and TB.

* About a third of the world's population carries TB but only 5-10 percent of people with TB will become sick. Poor living conditions, diet and other illnesses turn the latent TB into an active illness.

* Between 2000 and 2020 nearly 1 billion people will contract TB, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said, from those 200 million will become ill and 35 million will die.

* Lower and lower-middle income countries account for about 90 percent of the world's TB cases. The regions worst affected are Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

* In the Tomsk region of Russia, the number of deaths from TB per 100,000 people has dropped to 12.1 last year from 22.6 in 1999. This compares with a rise to 36.3 deaths per 100,000 people in the whole of Siberia from 28.6 in 1999.

* Around 15 percent of new TB cases in Tomsk are drug-resistant. This is among the highest rates in the world: the average is just over 5 percent. Baku in Azerbaijan has the highest rate of drug resistance in new cases, at 22 percent.

* The U.S. doctors who helped organise the project in the Tomsk region, Partners in Health, said they used the following drugs to treat patients with multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis:

kanamycin, ofloxacin, ethionamide, Paser, cycloserine and pirazinamide. If the patient does not react to kanamycin, capreomycin replaces it.

Sources: World Health Organisation (WHO) and Partners in Health (PIH)

AlertNet news is provided by