The World Health Organization (WHO) Tuesday urged all countries to seek new and innovative ways to halt the spread of tuberculosis (TB).

To date, one out of three people sick with TB still fails to access timely and accurate diagnosis and to receive effective treatment, the Manila-based Regional Office for the Western Pacific of the World Health Organization said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

To highlight the need for new and innovative ways to battle the disease, the theme of this year's World Stop TB Day, marked every March 24, is "Innovation to accelerate action".

This year's campaign seeks to recognize individuals around the world who have found new ways to halt TB in the fields of researches aimed at developing new diagnostics, drugs or vaccines and operational researches aimed at making TB care more effective and efficient among other efforts.

One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are designed to improve human well-being through better health, seeks to halve TB prevalence and death rates relative to 1990 levels. By 2050, the target is to eliminate TB as a public health problem, measured as one case per million population, it said.