The world could be on the brink of a tuberculosis apocalypse unless new ways of fighting the incurable strains of the disease are found.

That grim warning was issued yesterday by Mario Raviglione, the director of the Stop TB department of the World Health Organisation, at an international conference in Cape Town.

He told reporters that 4 percent of tuberculosis cases around the world were currently untreatable — caused by so called multi-drug resistant and extreme drug resistant strains.

But this percentage could grow.