This post was written by Sandi Doughton:

In the final hour of a Seattle conference on tuberculosis today, an African activist chided a room full of top health officials, scientists and other experts for their lack of action.

"The gap between rhetoric and reality grows bigger and bigger," said Paula Akugizibwe, regional treatment advocacy coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

Akugizibwe said she won't attend anymore conferences like the Pacific Health Summit, where the same people say the same things, then jet off to yet another conference for more of the same.

"We are sitting in fancy hotels, and people are dying," she said. "We've been talking about this for way too long. It's a travesty."

Many of the world's most powerful public health officials attended the conference, including World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan, UNICEF chief Ann Veneman, and top officials from the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the sponsors.

The topic of the final session was how to boost media coverage of tuberculosis and create a sense of urgency about a disease that kills 2 million people a year, mostly in the developing world.

Press coverage of the conference itself was restricted, though. Journalists were allowed to attend, but not to quote participants by name or affiliation without their express permission.

Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Global Relations and one of the most outspoken flamethrowers in attendance, told the group she couldn't understand why they couldn't create a sense of urgency, when the situation is so dire that officials should be "running around with their hair on fire."

For example, when nearly half a million new cases of multi-drug-resistant TB occur around the world each year, Kenya recently announced it can only afford to provide the costly treatment to 40 patients, Garrett said.

Dr. Krista Dong, who works with TB and AIDS patients in South Africa, said the conference was too focused on technology, like new drugs and vaccines and quicker ways to diagnose tuberculosis. Even if those things were available today, clinics and hospitals in Africa couldn't use them, she said. Most medical workers don't even have basic tools, like the special face masks needed to protect them from TB and prevent its spread. There's no room to isolate TB patients. Instead, they're all crowded into the same room, but then they share bathrooms with other patients.

"If you could lift (one of these hospitals) up and drop it here in Seattle, it would immediately be wrapped, quarantined and burned," Dong said.

Garrett pointed out that the little-known H8, or Health 8, made up of the world's top global health officials, meets Friday in Seattle. She called on the forum, which rarely reveals its agenda or conclusions, to take some concrete steps to help people with tuberculosis.