US to help Philippines make tuberculosis thing of the past

The United States government has reaffirmed its commitment to help eradicate tuberculosis in the Philippines as the country marked World TB Day on Saturday.

In a statement posted on the US Embassy Manila website, US Agency for International Development Philippines mission director Gloria Steele said USAID was working with the government in implementing TB prevention and control activities to help the country meet its TB objective as outlined in the Philippines Development Plan for 2011-2016.

“The United States will continue to work with our partners to fight this deadly disease,” Steele said. “We are partnering with the National TB Control Program and the Department of Health in strengthening the public and private sectors’ capacities to implement DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short-Course), the internationally recommended strategy for TB control,” she said.

Tuberculosis is an airborne infectious disease. The majority of TB deaths occur in developing countries. The disease is closely linked to substandard housing and poor nutrition.

The Philippines is ninth in the world on tuberculosis with approximately 390,000 Filipinos having the disease and 75 people dying from it daily.

USAID’s Linking Initiatives and Networking to Control Tuberculosis (TB LINC) project is a five-year program aimed at sustaining the coordination and collaboration of TB control partners from both the public and private sectors.

The project provides technical assistance to the National TB Program and works directly with high TB prevalence and low-performing provinces and cities throughout the country, including the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Implemented by the DOH, the project supports the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce TB prevalence and mortality by half by 2015 by helping the government achieve the targets of 70 percent case detection rate and 90 percent treatment success rate.

To curb the spread of the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged countries in the Western Pacific region,  including the Philippines, to step up their fight against TB by improving their respective healthcare systems. TB is a curable disease.

Dr. Shin Young-soo, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific,  noted that the communicable disease had continued to be “unacceptably high” in the Western Pacific with more than 1.3 million people diagnosed and 260,000 deaths every year.

“Countries need to strengthen their health systems to prevent the development and spread of TB, especially multidrug-resistant TB,”  Shin said in a statement.

Multidrug-resistant TB continues to proliferate due to poor treatment practices, wrong prescriptions, irregular intake of medicines and use of substandard drugs by TB patients, he said.

Globally, TB ranks second among the top infectious killer disease. In 2011, 8.4 million people contracted the disease, with 1.4 million succumbing to it, said the WHO official.

At least 22 countries continue to carry 80 percent of the “burden” of TB, four of which are in the Western Pacific region: The Philippines, Cambodia, China and Vietnam, with the poorest and marginalized populations who have limited access to healthcare as the most affected. With a report from Jocelyn R. Uy