The leading funding body, strongly disputed the finding, saying the former communist countries would be much worse off without the loans.

Tuberculosis is a disease that takes time to develop, said William Murray, a spokesman for the fund, so presumably the increase in mortality rates must be linked to something that happened earlier than IMF funding. This is just phony science.

The researchers studied health records in 21 countries and found that obtaining an IMF loan was associated with a 13.9 per cent increase in new cases of tuberculosis each year, a 13.3 per cent increase in the number of people living with the disease and a 16.6 percent increase in the number of tuberculosis deaths, the New York Times reported.

The study, being published online today in the journal PLoS Medicine, statistically controlled for numerous other factors that affect tuberculosis rates, including the prevalence of AIDS, inflation rates, urbanisation, unemployment rates, the age of the population and improved surveillance.

The lead author, David Stuckler, a research associate at Cambridge University, defended the study against the fund's criticisms, noting that the researchers considered whether increased mortality might have led to more loans rather than the other way around.

Instead, they found that the increase in tuberculosis mortality followed the lending; each 1 per cent increase in credit was associated with a 0.9 per cent increase in mortality. And when a country left an IMF loan programme, mortality rates dropped by an average of 31 per cent.

ÒWhen you have one correlation, you raise an eyebrow,Ó Stuckler said. ÒBut when you have more than 20 correlations pointing in the same direction, you start building a strong case for causality,Ó he was quoted as saying by the New York Times.