The World Health Organization recently reported that the number of cases of tuberculosis(TB) has been _ since 2006 . Also, fewer people are dying from TB. But a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, says smoking could threaten this progress. Nearly twenty percent of all people use tobacco, and millions of non-smokers get sick from breathing the smoke. The new study predicts that smoking will produce an additional thirty-four million TB deaths by 2024. Efforts to control the spread of TB have mainly focused on finding and treating infections. Fewer efforts have been made to understand the causes. Dr Anthony Fauci is the director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases. He said, "Despite our control efforts, we still have more than a million people each year dying from TB and millions of people  getting infected; we realize it's still a very important problem. So we have to do the practical thing and we have to do the fundamental research things at the same time. " Smoking does not cause TB; bacteria cause the infection. But the study says smoking affects the nervous system in a way that makes an inactive case of TB more likely to develop into an active one. Stanton Glantz is the director of the University of California's Centre for Tobacco Control Research and Education and an author of the new study. He says it shows that TB cannot be controlled unless tobacco use is controlled.  He said, "It increases the number of people who will get TB by about seven percent." The study is described as the first to identify a direct link between tobacco use and rates of TB infection and death. Professor Glantz says the results should guide those creating health policies and TB control efforts. He said, "If you want to control the infectious disease of TB, you have to control the tobacco industry and the tobacco industry's efforts to increase tobacco use, particularly in developing countries where TB is a big problem." What would Dr Anthony Fauci probably agree with?
More efforts are needed to find the causes of TB infections. TB infections are no longer a serious problem. Few efforts have been put into the work of treating TB infections. The practical and the fundamental research cannot be done together at present.