The Tuberculosis burden

A new report by the national tuberculosis and leprosy control programme has simply confirmed that the country has not made any progress in tackling the infectious but curable disease.

Tanzania ranks 14th among the world's 22 countries with the largest TB burdens. Treatment success has slowly increased toward the WHO global target of 85.

Nigeria was ranked first in Africa and only came behind India, Indonesia and China in the total TB burden. The new report also said some 80 per cent of TB cases were undetected while some 1.5 million people died from TB annually.

The WHO 10-year strategy (2006-2015) to cut down the burden of TB in the world worked elsewhere as it reportedly saved some 37 million lives while some countries halved the prevalence of the disease. It is even more worrying because substantial numbers of the people infected in the country were unreported or undiagnosed, most of them women and children in neighbourhoods where poor ventilation and squalor abet the spread of the disease. 

Tuberculosis, better known as TB, is perhaps the single leading cause of death from any infectious agent. It is caused by a bacterium which most commonly affects the lungs and transmitted from person to person through air droplets. 

TB affects all species of vertebrates and though control measures had reportedly limited the spread through animals, they (particularly cattle) still constitute a significant source of risk in countries like Nigeria where meat and milk inspection by health officials are often overlooked. Globally, TB was one of the top causes of death in 2015, responsible for more deaths than HIV and malaria.

However, tuberculosis is a curable disease. But that is dependent on early detection and correct diagnosis aided with proper treatment. Many patients afflicted with TB do not complete the TB therapy and even worse, many do not make themselves available for treatment. Failure to complete the treatment and the mismanagement of drugs had led to the death of many patients and an increase in variants of the disease that are drug-resistant. According to medical doctors the burden of the disease was often complicated by the drug-resistant TB, the Human Immune Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Unfortunately, all these still fall short of what is expected to contain the epidemic.  “We therefore  face an uphill battle to reach the global targets for tuberculosis," said Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director General. "There must be a massive scale-up of efforts, or countries will continue to run behind this deadly epidemic and these ambitious goals will be missed."

What this means is that the relevant agencies have to put in more effort to achieve the global target of 90 per cent reduction in TB deaths and an 80 per cent reduction in TB cases by 2030. It is, no doubt, an uphill task.