By Hassan Zaggi
Concerned by the low awareness of the Tuberculosis (TB) across the country despite the consisted effort by the government, development partners and Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) over the years, stakeholders have decided to take the campaign to major cities and communities.
Speaking at the awareness walk which is part of the activities lined up for the 2023 World TB day in Abuja, on Wednesday, the Executive Director, KNCV TB Foundation Nigeria, Dr Berthrand Odume, lamented that even though substantial progress has been made so far in the fight against TB , more effort is required to meet the global target for TB control in Nigeria.
He, however, applauded donor partners and the federal government for the efforts so far, stressing that the national programs and partners have made substantial effort as Nigeria is no longer where it was three years ago.
“Where we were three years ago is not where we are today. Case finding in Nigeria has now slashed to remain hovering around 190000. In the last three years, the national program and partners have been able to move the case detection from less than 100000 to about 200000 at the last reporting period. For me, that is a very substantial effort.
“In doing this, it has been able to increase treatment coverage which as at the last reporting, it was about 44 percent.
“For us to meet the global target for TB control in Nigeria, people in the rural communities need to be considered and brought on our back. This is because most of the cases we are seeing presently are coming from the rural communities.
“The report of the NCTNP of last year showed that 40 percent of the cases are coming from the rural communities and that’s why the national program and partner has intensify efforts to ensure that we push TB case finding within communities. For us to make meaningful effort, awareness creation and push must be sustained at the lowest level of the target population which is the community”, Dr Odume noted. .
Speaking, the Deputy Director, Programmatic Management of Drug-Resistant Tobacco Control (PMDT) NTBLCP of the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr Ahmad Muhammad Ozi, said that the government is not resting on its oars to ensure that TB awareness gets to all nook and crannies of the country.
While noting that a lot of progress has been made, Nigeria still has a long way to go to meet the 2030 target of ending TB.
“As we are aware, March 24 is world TB day and we use this day to create awareness, we have other activities apart from creating awareness, lots of policies have been put in place by the Federal Government, there are preventive campaign, early testing which is free in every community is free and the policy says that the treatment is free.
“This at the Federal Government level, so the state is also planning their own so also the local government.
“We are thinking of ending TB in 2030 in Nigeria but as it is, the country still has a long way to go because of what we had last year. We were able to notify over 280,000 new cases out of 400,000 so you see we have covered about 60% notification rate. We still have about 40%, yes we still have a long way to go.
“We want to ensure we have the response of the TB program to the nearest minimum. We are not meeting the target for now. If we have about 400,00 cases to notify and we are notifying only about 280,000 cases, that means we still have a lot of missing cases,” Dr. Ozi noted.
