TB kills 129 per day in Bangladesh

Tuberculosis remains a public health concern as 129 people die of the infectious disease every day in Bangladesh, according to the latest data of the government.

The disease also makes 978 people ill every day, according to the National Tuberculosis Control Programme.

Bangladesh remained among the 30 top TB burden countries in the world despite making progress in controlling the disease.

‘We are increasing our capacity to detect more cases and the rate of recovery is satisfactory, but still a long way to go before eradicating the disease from the country,’ said the TB control programme director Shamiul Islam while speaking at a roundtable in the city on Wednesday.

The data of the year 2019 on the disease was disclosed at the discussion.

According to the data, at least 357,000 TB patients are identified in a year in Bangladesh with an incidence rate of 221 per 1 lakh people, and the TB mortality rate is 29 per 1 lakh people.

According to the report, what is concerning is that every year at least 5,900 TB patients are identified with multi-drug resistance. Among them, 1.5 per cent are new patients and 4.9 per cent are previously-treated patients but re-diagnosed with the drug-resistant TB bacteria.

Another concern is that about 18 per cent of the country’s TB patients remained undetected,

risking the scope of spreading the disease to other people.

TB cases, despite TB being a notifiable disease, are not reported by the doctors or the patients themselves to the TB control programme.

‘The undetected patients are spreading the disease to healthy people unknowingly,’ said Shamiul.

He urged all with TB symptoms to contact with any government health facilities as TB treatment completely free.

National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital director Shahedur Rahman Khan said that the TB control programme should take strategy of testing all the relatives and neighbours along with newly-detected TB patients.

‘Before a TB patient is diagnosed with the disease, he/she has already spread the disease to at least 10 people,’ he said.

So the screening of relatives and neighbours of the new TB patients would help identifying the undetected cases, he remarked.

Professor Shakil Ahmed of paediatrics department at Shaheed Suhrawardy Hospital said that a large number of child TB patients remained undetected. Annually about 12,000 children with TB are detected but the actual number might be over 35,000, he said.

The TB control programme advisor on Global Fund, Abdul Hamid Selim, said that Bangladesh still remained largely dependent on microscopic tests of TB though the detection rate by such tests was about 50 per cent.

High-tech diagnostic machine GeneXpert is efficient to detect TB, but Bangladesh has only 216 such machines against the demand of about 1,200.

Maya Sepal, World Health Organisation communicable disease surveillance medical officer in Bangladesh, said that the preventive therapy had been introduced in different countries and it should also be introduced in large scale in Bangladesh to prevent TB.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net