Health workshop: TB treatment to be reduced from 8 to 6 months

Infection spreading because of illiteracy, lack of awareness and dense population.

PESHAWAR:

The duration of treatment for tuberculosis (TB) will be reduced from eight to six months starting January next year, said health experts at an awareness workshop at the Peshawar Press Club.

“The World Health Organization has issued directives to administer the medicine rifampicin continuously for six months in order to lessen two months of treatment,” said TB Control Programme District Officer Dr Taj Muhammad.

Presently rifampicin is administered during the initial two months of the eight-month-long treatment course. Dr Muhammad said the new directives would reduce the likelihood of patients leaving the treatment incomplete.

He explained that Drug Resistant TB, a type of TB, which develops when the patient takes medicine irregularly leads to other diseases and is more dangerous than AIDS since treating it is a long and expensive process.

The workshop was organised for the media by the National TB Control Programme in collaboration with Global Fund, a non-governmental organisation working to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

The district officer said the government had set up 212 diagnoses centres and 816 treatment centres across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where 8,707 patients have been registered in the past three months. He said the test and treatment facilities were free of cost.

“The government has established these centres in the province, now it is the responsibility of everyone suffering from TB to utilise them,” he said.

A health expert said that a patient can infect as many as 15 healthy persons annually. He said the bacteria settles in the lungs after being inhaled and begins to grow, it then moves through the blood to other parts of the body, such as the spine, brain and kidney.

He said that tuberculosis was spreading rapidly because of illiteracy, a lack of awareness about treatment, and densely populated areas.

The main symptoms of TB include loss of weight, loss of energy, loss of appetite, night sweats, fever and productive cough. According to the National TB Control Programme around 0.3 million people are infected by the bacteria annually.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th, 2012.