World Tuberculosis Day: TB spreads 29 per cent faster in jails

Pakistan could rise to fifth in WHO list of TB-affected countries.

LAHORE:

Tuberculosis (TB) spreads 29 per cent faster in jail than it does outside because the country’s prisons are overcrowded and inmates live in close proximity, said Punjab TB Control Programme Director Dr Drakashan Badar at an orientation session for journalists on World TB Day on Saturday.

Dr Badar said the closer two people are, the faster the disease travels between them. The close physical proximity of prisoners in overcrowded jails was the reason for the higher rates of TB in prisons than outside, she said.

Over 100,000 prisoners have been screened for TB under a Directly Observed Treatment Short-Course (DOTS) linkage programme, she said. “Health is a human right and those who are in jail do not forfeit this right. If inmates are not treated in jail for TB, they can put the general population at risk of the disease when they come out of jail,” she said.

Dr Badar said 300,000 people catch TB in Pakistan every year. She said that pulling out of treatment after it started was very dangerous, so TB patients must take the full course of the medicines they are prescribed. She said that new patients must take a six-month course of medicines while old patients needed an eight-month course.

Tuberculosis is also a cause of poverty, as if the breadwinner of the family catches the disease, the entire family faces financial trouble, she said. The Punjab government is providing free diagnostic and treatment facilities to TB patients in all hospitals and medical centres, she said. Modern laboratories have been set up in Rahim Yar Khan, Multan, Lahore, Faisalabad and Rawalpindi which can conduct a TB culture test within two hours.

She said that Pakistan had the sixth highest number of TB cases in the world. “The World Health Organisation has its own data compilation and they might put Pakistan in fifth position,” she said.

Dr Badar said that the detection of TB in children was difficult. “If a child has a cough for more than two weeks, a TB test is mandatory. Other major symptoms are weight loss and poor appetite,” she said.

Dr Hassan Raza of Mercy Corps, an NGO working for the eradication of TB, said that 56 percent of all TB patients in Pakistan were in the Punjab. He said that proper and timely treatment could help eliminate the disease from Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2012.