WHO worries over Nigeria’s ‘missing’ TB patients

WHO country representative in Nigeria, Dr Rui Gama Vaz, said 15% of the three million people undiagnosed for TB around the world were in Nigeria, most of them women and children in slum neighbourhoods where poor ventilation and squalour aids the spread of the disease.“If you don’t reach those women and children infected, they continue […]

WHO country representative in Nigeria, Dr Rui Gama Vaz, said 15% of the three million people undiagnosed for TB around the world were in Nigeria, most of them women and children in slum neighbourhoods where poor ventilation and squalour aids the spread of the disease.
“If you don’t reach those women and children infected, they continue to spread TB in their communities,” said Vaz in comments marking World TB Day in Abuja.
Nigeria has the highest TB burden in Africa, the WHO said in its 2014 Global TB Report.
It comes as National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Programme launched its first-ever electronic information system to capture and map data on TB and patients diagnosed or being treated for the condition.
The first, e-TB manager, allows health workers keep track of any new patient diagnosed, their treatment and possible side effects to drugs. The second tool, GxAlert, links with existing GeneXpert machines and cut time for testing and report TB test results by sending same results to patient managers via emails and SMS.
Health Minister Khaliru Alhassan, who launched the programmes, spoke of possible installation of more GeneXpert to increase nationwide capacity for diagnosis from the current 98—18 of them donated by the Agbami Partners.
But anti-TB programme contends with difficulty getting people from urban slums with high chances of exposure into TB test and treatment, which are free.
Already, some TB cases resistant to common drugs have emerged, and 922 people with drug-resistant TB have been put on treatment, according to the minister.
Treatment centres for drug-resistant TB patients have grown from one in 2010 to 12 last year and five more could be opened this year, said Alhassan.
Some 15 states have initiated treatment of drug-resistant TB patients in their communities, and the use of e-TB and GxAlert could make tracking them more effective, according to Dr Gabriel Akang, national coordinator of NTBLCP.
“Most of these patients are in [their] communities,” he told Daily Trust. “Before now we were just sitting in our clinics waiting for the patients to report. But we now develop a new strategy to go the community to look for these patients.”
The strategy, which will involve combing through urban slums, need civil society groups to mobilize residents, but CSOs say they have been left out of TB control programmes and are not experiencing great support from government, according to Abba-Gana Adam, national coordinator of Civil Society for the Eradication of Tuberculosis in Nigeria.