A deadly drug-resistant new strain of tuberculosis on the rise this year has forced scientists to confront a new problem: old drugs and a more than century-old TB test that takes weeks to get laboratory confirmation. Scientists, doctors and public health specialists met in Paris on Monday to discuss the urgent need for better tests, new drugs and a broadly effective vaccine. TB drugs prescribed today are more than 40 years old, and they require patients to undergo a six- to nine-month treatment regimen. A respiratory illness spread by coughing and sneezing, tuberculosis is the world's deadliest curable infectious disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.7 million people die from TB every year. A recent survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization found that one in 50 TB cases around the world is resistant not only to the usual first-choice TB treatments, but also to many last-line-of-defense medications. That classifies the disease as extensively drug resistant, or XDR, TB.