African nations are failing to control tuberculosis and could be overwhelmed by drug resistant strains of the infectious lung disease, with dire implications for the war on AIDS, a leading AIDS activist said yesterday.

?The explosion of tuberculosis on the continent is combined with the explosion and advance of the HIV epidemic,? Zackie Achmat, the head of South Africa?s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), told Reuters in an interview in Cape Town. ?We need new TB vaccines, new TB testing and we need new TB medicines,? Achmat said as he and other activists prepared for a November 8 march in the city that will champion a global call for a radical programme to attack TB. Spread through close personal contact, TB has long been a problem in Africa, where hundreds of millions of people are latent carriers. But its growing relationship with HIV has made treating both diseases more difficult in vulnerable populations.