“I call upon all Provincial Medical Directors, Directors of City Health Departments, and all health workers to ensure that HIV testing is readily available to all TB patients and that early ART initiation is enabled and enforced at all institutions for co-infected people,” said Minister of Health and Child Welfare, Henry Madzorera, in a statement marking World TB Day recently. “I will call this the final push in our fight against TB.”
Both TB and HIV treatment in the country are free of charge, but according to World Health Organisation guidelines of 2010, HIV patients with a CD4 count of 350 must be put on ART.
“Let me re-emphasise this important point: we would like 100 percent of people living with HIV to be screened for TB regularly, we want all TB patients to be tested for HIV and we want all TB/HIV co-infected people to be on ART,” he said.
Madzorera noted that the country was on the verge of missing the millennium development goal of reducing HIV and TB diseases to levels of the 1990s due to the co-infection.
“We have not yet achieved the desired position. Testing for HIV in TB patients stands at about 90 percent. ART uptake in TB/HIV co-infection stands at 60 percent. No wonder our treatment success for TB has persistently fallen short of the global benchmark target of 87 percent,” he said. Recently the ministry embarked on the decentralisation of TB screening treatment in an effort to improve the treatment success rate but co-infection is limiting the efforts.
Madzorera said the current surge in Multi-Drug-Resistant TB was due to the improvement of diagnostic capabilities and health service providers should be prepared to contain the disease.
“The number of reported cases of MDR TB nearly doubled between 2011 and 2012, from 156 to 244 cases,” he said.
“As we continue to remove all barriers to accessing healthcare and improve diagnostic capabilities for drug resistant TB we are going to experience an artificial epidemic of the disease and therefore we must be in a state of readiness.”
Post published in: News