Government pledges to control Tuberculosis

Vice President John Dramani Mahama on Friday said Government is committed to support efforts of the National Tuberculosis (TB) Control Programme to establish and understand the burden of the disease. This he said would provide further information on better ways to accelerate progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for TB.

He called on Ghanaians to support the national efforts by cooperating with the team of investigators who might be calling on them from December 2012-December 2013 to establish data of the disease.

In a speech on his behalf on World TB Day he said despite the efforts being made, there is an emerging threat of Multi-Drug Resistant TB (MDR-TB) also known as the silent killer that threatened to negate all efforts achieved so far.

TB is a disease which is contracted through breathing. The World TB day is marked to climax TB public educational and awareness campaigns all over the world.

This year’s campaign slogan is “Stop TB in my Lifetime”. It was for this reason government a couple of weeks ago secured a financing arrangement of $21 million with The Netherlands Government through the ORIO project to improve diagnostics capacities for TB in particular and other conditions of health institutions throughout the country.

The ORIO project aims at reinforcing the national health care system. Vice President Mahama said the country urgently needs a specialised facility that would admit and treat patients suffering from MDR-TB and the use of emerging infectious diseases.

“Our fight against TB will be incomplete without such facility. This is a heavy price to pay if we don’t stop TB in our lifetime. Children will bear the blunt.” Deputy Minister of Health, Rojo Mettle Nunoo said TB is a poverty related disease and that in an election year where there would be large gatherings of people at political rallies, there is the need to adopt health etiquette such as coughing with mouth covered with handkerchiefs.

This, he said called for public education and awareness creation and reaching out to the poorest in the society to help hedge the disease as well as improve laboratories, diagnosis and the supply of quality drugs.

He noted that the long term goal was to eliminate the disease entirely and appealed to the National TB Control Programme (NTP) to translate TB literature into local languages to help combat the disease.

Dr Frank Bonsu, Programme Manager for the NTP said the country had progressed in TB control and now on track to eliminate TB in Ghana in the next decade.

“The next decade is definitely within the lifetime of most people assembled here. We would say we have reached TB elimination target when for every one million Ghanaians we at most can identify only one case of TB.”

The recent WHO Global TB report released in 2011 was quite revealing he said, and added that Ghana was among few African countries that had met the World Health Assembly target of 70 per cent TB case detection and 85 per cent treatment success target while TB incidence and prevalence had reduced almost by 50 per cent, a clear indication that Ghana is likely to achieve the MDG target for TB control.

In 2011, Ghana recorded 15,842 TB cases which is 4.6 percentage increase over the previous year, 36 per cent (5,778) of notified TB cases were women as compared to 64 per cent who were men. (10,064).

The NTP and its NGO’s partners he said would continue to focus and target women from Central, Ashanti, Brong Ahafo and Upper West Regions whose correct knowledge on TB was particularly low as indicated by Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, 2008.

Dr Bonsu noted that current TB treatment success was 85.3 per cent while patients defaulting from treatment was three per cent with death rate at 7.6 per cent which he said was unacceptable, because TB was a curable condition.

Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Volta, Western and Upper East Regions have impressive treatment success records, falling just one or two percentage points below globally newly revised treatment success target of 90 per cent.

Dr Bonsu said other regions were expected to improve upon their performance which had high impact value interventions.

“We are improving our capacity to diagnose TB. Advances in sputum microscopy are currently underway. Very shortly turn-around time for sputum microscopy diagnosis will be less than 20 minutes with introduction of fluorescence microscopy. We shall be adding to our arsenals new diagnostics which will revolutionalise routine TB diagnosis and drug susceptibility testing shortly.”

A concerted government and media campaign, he said was needed in partnerships with civil society like stop TB partnerships, NGO’s and others like Musicians Union of Ghana’s President Obour, National TB Ambassador to help the most un-informed who were mostly in danger.

The country’s middle income status and global financial crisis meant sustainable financing of TB control activities must come from government of Ghana; Dr Bonsu said and added that attracting external support would therefore be difficult.

He noted that drug dependence and alcoholism weaken the immune system, leaving addicts at a higher risk of catching TB and making it far more likely that they would interrupt treatment when they were sick.

“Drug addicts with TB are becoming problem to the teaching hospitals. The real danger is creating drug resistant TB among this special type of patients that we are unable to supervise to adhere to treatment.

“Our goal is to provide universal access to TB services to the 24 million Ghanaian population. Tuberculosis services are free to all TB patients with or without health insurance. The health sector has a solid plan developed within the framework of the Global Plan to Stop TB in Ghana, “Dr Bonsu said.