Africa has reacted too slowly to tuberculosis, an infectious disease that kills thousands of people with HIV and AIDS on the continent every year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.

African leaders and the United Nations health body declared a tuberculosis emergency last year and the WHO has since launched a $56 billion global plan to halve TB prevalence and death rates and save 14 million lives by 2015.

“There is concern that African leaders are still failing to seriously invest in TB control,” the World Health Organization said, appealing for “more ambitious plans that are backed up by more funding from African countries and donors.”

Worldwide, about 1.7 million people died from tuberculosis and 8.9 million people caught the disease in 2004, the WHO said in its annual report on tuberculosis control.

It said Africa’s current crisis, linked to co-infection with HIV/AIDS and weak health systems, was contributing to a 1 percent rise in worldwide tuberculosis cases every year.

Strains of the disease which are resistant to combinations of drugs also remain prevalent in eastern Europe, the WHO said, urging the European Union to spend more to help stamp out the disease.

The WHO said three of six world regions - the Americas, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific - looked set to meet a U.N. target of detecting 70 percent of all tuberculosis cases and successfully treating 85 percent of those cases.

Europe, Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean region (which for the WHO includes the Middle East and parts of South Asia) probably all missed the end-2005 goal, although final figures will not be ready until late this year.

The WHO last week unveiled a new anti-tuberculosis strategy, which aims to expand treatment programs, improve diagnosis and prevent co-infection with HIV/AIDS.