Leading health experts have warned of an “explosion” in drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) in North Korea when funding to fight the deadly lung disease is withdrawn later this week.

They say life-saving treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients will end and unleash a possible public health “catastrophe” which could spread far beyond the reclusive state’s local borders.

The row centers on a controversial decision by the Global Fund, the international financing organisation for combating AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, to withdraw support for the treatment of TB in North Korea from the end of this month.

While the world has been anxiously fixated on Pyongyang’s nuclear threat, TB, the world’s biggest infectious killer, has been silently infecting more than 110,000 people a year, and killing thousands in the communist state.

The isolated country has one of the highest rates of TB infection outside of sub-Saharan Africa, with an average of 4,000 patients annually receiving care for multi-drug resistant (MDR) strains, and about 16,000 children on prevention programmes and 7,000 on treatment.