Summary World Health Organistaion lays stress on increasing for tuberculosis prevention.
ISLAMABAD (Agencies) - World TB Day, observed globally including Pakistan on 24th March 2013 for the second time, is focusing on bridging the funding gaps for TB prevention and control efforts.
World Health Organization (WHO), with the slogan “Stop TB in my lifetime, lays an overall stress on increasing funding for TB prevention, care and control efforts; while enhancing awareness of key progress in TB interventions and actions required ensuring further progress.
It is against this backdrop that today in Geneva WHO (World Health Organization) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) warned about spread of tuberculosis strains with resistance to multiple drugs highlighting an annual need of at least US$ 1.6 billion in international funding for treatment and prevention of the disease.
Dr Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO, and Dr Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the GFATM said that the only way to carry out the urgent work of identifying all new cases of tuberculosis, while simultaneously making progress against the most serious existing cases, will be to mobilize significant funding from international donors.
The WHO and the GFATM have identified an anticipated gap of US$1.6 billion in annual international support for the fight against tuberculosis in 118 low and middle income countries on top of an estimated US$3.2 billion that could be provided by the countries themselves. Filling this gap could enable full treatment for 17 million TB and multidrug-resistant TB patients and save 6 million lives between 2014-2016.
Pakistan which has the fifth highest burden of Tuberculosis in the world and the fourth highest in terms of multi-drug resistant (MDR) Tuberculosis is working on many fronts to address the problem with the technical support of WHO, and financial support of GFATM, USAID, KNCV, JICA, DFID and a number of other development partners.
A tripartite agreement between the National TB Control Program, WHO Pakistan and the Institute of Tropical Medicine Belgium has enabled the latter to act as a supra national laboratory for TB Control in Pakistan.
WHO is also technically supporting the USAID funded prevalence survey, and also assisting in incidence and drug resistance surveys to know the exact burden of the disease in Pakistan alongside efforts to detect and cure patients of Tuberculosis.
The current case detection rate of the program is 69% while the treatment success rate is 92%.
The WHO Representative in Pakistan Dr Ni’ma Saeed Abid has expressed satisfaction over the performance of the National and Provincial Tuberculosis Control Programs and hoped that with an increased pace of effort, the Millennium Development Goal relating to Tuberculosis may be at least partially achieved by 2015.
He emphasized that WHO has remained a consistent technical partner of the program and has been supporting the program particularly in the areas of monitoring and evaluation, resource mobilization and operational research. He described Tuberculosis Control as one of the few success stories in Pakistan’s Health Sector.
Dr Abid described it as a fight both against the disease and time as the more the time is lost, the more difficult it will be to control the disease with the additional risk of developing multi-drug resistant strains of Tuberculosis.
