The World Health Organisation warned Wednesday that dangerous and drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis are spreading at an alarming rate in Europe, and could claim many lives unless health authorities act quickly.

WHO's regional director for Europe, Zsuzsanna Jakab, warned that failure to tackle TB now would have grave consequences in the future.

"TB is an old disease that never went away, and now it is evolving with a vengeance," said Jakab, who noted the currently spreading TB is resistant to many drugs.

Reuters reports WHO is launching a new regional plan to find, diagnose and treat cases of the airborne infectious disease more effectively.

"The numbers are scary," Lucica Ditiu, executive secretary of the Stop TB Partnership, told a news conference in London. "This is a very dramatic situation."

TB is currently a worldwide pandemic that kills around 1.7 million people a year. The infection is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and destroys patients' lung tissue. When patients cough, they spread the bacteria through the air, putting others at great risk.

Reuters reports cases of multidrug-resistant (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) -- where the infections are resistant to first-line and then second-line antibiotic treatments -- are spreading fast, with about 440,000 new patients every year around the world.

According to the WHO and Stop TB, 15 of the 27 countries with the highest burden of MDR-TB are in the WHO's European region, which includes 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia.

More than 80,000 MDR-TB cases develop in the European region each year. This is almost a fifth of the world's total TB cases. The WHO said precise figures for XDR-TB are not available because most countries lack the facilities to diagnose it, but verified cases of XDR-TB increased sixfold between 2008 and 2009.

Rates are highest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but many countries in Western Europe have increasing rates of TB and drug-resistant TB, Ditiu said.

London has the highest TB rate of any capital in Western Europe with around 3,500 cases a year, 2 per cent of which are MDR-TB.

Reuters cited experts saying around 7 percent of patients with straightforward TB die, and that death rate rises to around 50 per cent of patients with drug-resistant forms.

The WHO's action plan for tackling tuberculosis emphasises the need for doctors and patients to be more aware of the disease and its symptoms, to diagnose and treat cases promptly with the right drugs, and follow patients up over many months or years to ensure they take their medications.

If that doesn't happen, "not only are these people quietly and painfully dying, they are also spreading the disease," Ditiu said.