A review into the hard-to-treat TB by a team of researchers at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Beijing, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, has revealed that insufficient treatment of the illness has been accounting for worse conditions in China.

It has been told by the team that China has been facing the epidemic since long and the number has reached a notable high from 110,000 cases in 2007.

The team has found that the main reason behind the failure to combat the infection is its drug-resistance power. Generic medicines such as rifampin and isoniazid, which are used to treat the disease, are given to patients in multi-therapies. However, the bacteria resists to all.

The WHO has reported that the illness has become the second most infectious disease killer after HIV/AIDS as it had affected a total of 8.8 million people in 2010. Also, 1.4 million people out of them had to face death.

It is therefore being said that extra care and caution needs to be put so as to fight the evil. "We've been looking for new chemical classes of drugs for tuberculosis for a while", said Scott G. Franzblau, director of the Institute for Tuberculosis Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago.