Native leaders and international public health experts are meeting in Toronto this week to hammer out a plan to cut tuberculosis rates in half in the next seven years.

Overcrowded housing, poor nutrition and lack of health care are blamed for about 1,600 new Canadian cases of the highly contagious lung disease each year, according to the international Stop TB Partnership.

The objective of the meeting, co-hosted by the Assembly of First Nations and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, representing 53 Arctic communities, is to push for native-led economic solutions, as well as expanded access to treatment and improved tracking of cases and underlying causes, officials said.

At the Cross Lake First Nation, about 500 kilometres north of Winnipeg, nine-month-old Manny Ross has to take preventive drugs twice a week for tuberculosis that he caught from his grandmother.

The boy, his grandmother, Mary Ross, and 10 other family members were living in the same house at the time, and the disease spread quickly.

"I didn't know and I felt bad," she said. "If I would've known, everybody would've been out of this house."

The Ross family is part of what aboriginal leaders and Health Canada are calling an outbreak of TB, with 19 active cases in the community.

TB rates for aboriginal people on and off reserve were 29 times higher for than the non-aboriginal population between 2002 and 2006, said Angus Toulouse, Ontario's vice-chief for the Assembly of First Nations.

"TB control should be a basic part of the health-care system for indigenous communities," Marcos Espinal, executive secretary of the Stop TB Partnership, told a news conference in Toronto on Thursday.

It's not only a health hazard but a national disgrace that eight to 12 people live in every house in Cross Lake, Chief Alex Robinson said.

"They always say Canada is one of the best countries to live in in the world, and yet when it comes to aboriginal people, we're treated as third-world citizens."

Disease of poverty, WHO says

The World Health Organization has called tuberculosis a disease of poverty, a contributing factor that also needs to be addressed in Canada, aboriginal leaders said.

"The best cure for this poverty is employment and economic development opportunities," Toulouse said.

The federal government already spends about $6.5 million annually to prevent and control tuberculosis, with the goal of eliminating the disease by 2050.

The Tuberculosis elimination strategy was launched in 1992 to drive down rates to one per 100,000 by 2010. But native leaders now say that goal looks out of reach, and more needs to be done.

With files from the Canadian Press