Health Minister Mohammad Nasim on Thursday urged all to work together to make Bangladesh free from the burden of tuberculosis (TB) as the country is still reeling from the disease.
“It is very difficult task to eliminate TB completely… But our efforts should be redoubled to control the disease,” he told a roundtable on “Role of DOT to prevent Drug registrant TB” in the BRAC centre here.
Directorate General of Health Service (DGHS), the daily Ittefaq and BRAC, a non-government oragization, jointly organized the roundtable.
Senior Vice-President of National Anti-Tuberculosis Association of Bangladesh (NATAB) Mozaffar Hossain Platu, Additional Director General of DGHS Prof Dr Abul Kalam Azad, former vice chancellor of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University(BSMMU) Rashid-E-Mahmub and programme manager TB under the national tuberculosis programme Dr Md Jahangir Alam Sarker, among others, addressed the roundtable with managing director of the daily Ittefaq in the chair.
Health experts, physicians, officials of government and non-government organizations, among others, joined the open discussion while line director-TB and leprosy under National Tuberculosis Control Programme Dr Md Mozammel Haque presented the keynote paper.
Nasim said director general of WHO lauded Bangladesh’s successes in the health sector as Bangladesh has set an example for its remarkable achievements including reducing child and maternal mortality as well as attaining polio-free status.
“Like other diseases, we can achieve similar successes in controlling TB,” he added.
To intensify the efforts to eradicate TB in the country, both print and electronic media can play an important role in creating awareness on the decease, Nasim added.
Despite financial constraint, Bangladesh is maintaining its progress in health sector due to coordinated efforts of all as well as sincere and effective policy initiatives of the present government, he added.
Health experts said despite achieving a remarkable success in detection and treatment of tuberculosis (TB), it is still a major public health problem in Bangladesh as the number of TB patients stood nearly 1,80,000 in 2014.
Urban TB control has been a major challenge for Bangladesh as urban setting is more complex than rural setting and Bangladesh has attained 90 per cent cure rate of TB treatment against the global target of 85 per cent and it also has witnessed a success in case detection of the disease, experts said.
Bangladesh is one of the 22 high-burden TB countries in the world and the estimated incidence and prevalence rates for all forms of tuberculosis in 2012 were 225 and 434 per 100000 population respectively, they said adding about 45 per 100000 people died of TB in the same year.
