This Friday, it was still a "day of". This time, one énième attempt to mobilize on a quiet pandemia. Like all the others, but perhaps more than the others, Lee Jong-wook, the general manager of WHO (the World Health Organization) ensures, an epidemic which "should belong to the past whereas it always progresses in the world." Tuberculosis. Figures which give the giddiness: 16 million "official" patients, 9 000 new infections and 5 000 deaths per day. This rate/rhythm, nearly a billion people will be infected in the twenty years, 200 million will develop the disease and 35 million will die about it.

WHO, faithful to a strategy based on the optimism ­ which does not achieve the unanimity (to read opposite) ­, is pleased with progress. Announce the tracking of 70 % of the cases of tuberculosis and the treatment successfully of 85 % of them at at the end of 2005. Suggest that vingt-six country already achieved the goal with one year in advance on the fixed calendar. Launch a new plan ("Halt with tuberculosis") presented in large pump at the Forum of Davos. Objective: to save 14 million lives from here at 2015. Amount: 56 billion dollars... 31 billion misses.

Behind this race with the figures, others still. The plague explodes in China and India. And one counts 300 000 cases resistant to the treatments, in particular in Eastern Europe. Because if 98 % of deaths are in the poorest countries, pandemia perhaps more than others a disease of is excluded. "the disease of poverty par excellence , recalls one to WHO, contrary to the AIDS." Rich countries included. Thus, more than 7 000 new cases were listed in the United Kingdom in 2004, a rise of almost 5 %.