Abuja — FIRST Lady, Aisha Buhari, has tasked stakeholders in the health sector to work together for eradication of Tuberculosis in the country.
President Muhammdu Buhari’s wife,who is the Global Tuberculosis Ambassador, insisted that all stakeholders must work as a team if according to her, Nigerians wants to eradicate Tuberculosis from the country, through a multi sectorial approach and effective coordination.
Speaking, Tuesday,in Abuja,at the National TB Conference 2021, the wife of the president raised concerns that the country was at a crossroad in to its response to TB eradication.
Buhari’s wife,who was represented at the occasion by the First Lady of Niger State,Mrs Amina Abubakar Bello, said: “Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nigeria still made progress in case detection and treatment. But we need to intensify effort to recover lost ground.
“It is important that we should not loss sight of TB which has been around us much longer and continue to kill people in Nigeria in an alarming rate.
“Since my appointment as Global TB Champion and Ambassador I have used my position to push TB issues among stakeholders at the National, Regional and Global levels. At this forum in 2018 , I promise to cascade this effort by appointing all the wives of governors as state TB champions and it has been a game changer as it is helping to create more awareness about TB up to the community levels.
“This effort has increase TB advocacy and mobilisation all over Nigeria and will help to galvanise the much needed support from the Federal, state and Local Government levels.”
Aisha Buhari who commended health workers for their response to TB, expressed worry that despite being curable, Nigeria still loses many people to the disease but added that with the help of governor’s wives, more awareness was being created on TB, particularly in the rural areas.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, noted that the advent of COVID19 pandemic and its control measures impacted many aspects of human endeavor and in some cases, reversed the gains made over the years including TB control.
“The pandemic brought 2020 global case finding levels back to 2012 level, with an 18% reduction in the number of patients diagnosed with TB dropping from 7.1 million in 2019 to 5.8 million in 2020, thus setting global case finding efforts back by 8 years.”
Dr. Ehanire noted that Nigeria recorded a 30% reduction in GeneXpert testing in the first week of the lockdown, the number of notified TB cases also dropped by 17% from 33,119 TB cases in Q1, 2020 to 27,353 in Q2,2020.
“This necessitated the conceptualization and implementation of innovative interventions to ensure program sustainability and mitigate impact on TB control efforts, the implementation of which resulted in an eventual 15% increase across the country, in the number of TB cases notified from 120,266 TB cases in 2019 to 138,591 TB cases in 2020, making us one of the few countries that recorded increased in TB notification in 2020, despite the pandemic.
“Key among the interventions was a strategic engagement of the private sector, introduction of targeted, data driven community TB case finding activities, integration of TB case finding in COVID-19 outreaches, active TB and integrated TB/COVID-19 case finding activities in health facilities among others. Some of these helpful practices in TB case finding will be shared during this conference, so I urge participants to attend all the sessions.”
Acting Board Chairman, Stop TB Partnership Nigeria, Dr. Ayodele Awe, said that the National TB Conference 2021, aims to galvanise action towards ending TB in Nigeria and across the world.
Source: