WESTERN REGION RECORDS MORE TB CASES (PAGE 29)

STORY: Kwame Asiedu Marfo, Takoradi

The Western Region recorded 1,761 cases of tuberculosis (TB), with 93 deaths, last year.
The Deputy Western Regional Director of Health Services, Dr (Mrs) Linda Vanotoo, announced this at a press briefing to commemorate this year’s World TB Day in Takoradi.
She said within the past three years, national TB incidence had levelled off around 57 cases per 100,000 people, adding that “this is due to our combined effort, the expanding economy and poverty reduction”.
However, she said in absolute terms, the reported cases of TB were increasing because of population expansion and increased access to health services.
She said this year’s theme for the World TB Day, “I Am Stopping TB”, underlined the collective responsibility that touched everyone, everywhere to combat this curable disease.
She pointed out that TB, which was everywhere, needed all hands on deck to combat it.
Last year, she said, the health services started a process of taking TB treatment into the communities, homes, villages, prisons, as well as workplaces, and that the partnership between the public health facilities and the communities would be galvanised to play a role in TB prevention and treatment.
Dr Vanotoo said the introduction of an Enablers Package last year was designed to ensure improved access to TB services by patients at whatever level they found themselves.
The package, she explained, reduced the cost of treatment to the patients and facilities, adding that it motivated health providers to work harder and improve treatment successes.
“This package is to comprehensively describe all the activities involved in the care and support of TB patients and to provide the framework and guidelines for the healthcare system to quantify the cost of activities involved in treating patients to achieve cure,” he said.
“In order to give effective meaning to the World TB Day theme for this year, everyone everywhere in the region must make a special effort to contribute to the identification and/or successful treatment of an existing TB case in our community,” she added.
She added that people who were HIV positive had a higher chance of getting TB and that similarly people with TB had a greater chance of getting and dying from HIV infection, saying, “We all have a duty to stop these two major killer, yet preventable, diseases.”