TB need not kill

Tens of thousands of Afghans are diagnosed with tuberculosis every year. A majority of them are women.

The Ministry of Public Health says 37,000 positive cases of tuberculosis (TB) were detected between March 22, 2015 and Jan 21 this year.

Tens of thousands of Afghans are diagnosed with tuberculosis every year. A majority of them are women.

The Ministry of Public Health says 37,000 positive cases of tuberculosis (TB) were detected between March 22, 2015 and Jan 21 this year. There were 32,000 positive cases in the previous year.

Ibrahim Kawoosi, head of the information in the ministry, says 66.7 percent of the infected were female. Mohammad Khaled Sidiq, the head of the government’s TB programme says according to the World Health Organisation, the number of TB patients in Afghanistan is an estimated 58,000.

The Ministry of Public Health has set up 1,304 facilities to test for TB across the country and people are satisfied with the services offered.

Zarmina from Kabul’s Shahr e Naw has been suffering from TB for the last three years. She says she had a chronic cough and fever but when she consulted doctors both in a private and a government hospital “they told me I had been affected by serious flu.” It was following tests in the government TB clinic that she was diagnosed with the disease. Doctors also advised her to get her 8-year-old daughter tested. “It was found that she was also infected,” says Zarmina.

“If we had an efficient government and skilled health workers my illness would have been detected three years ago and not now that it has infected my daughter,” she says.

Serious loophole

Mohammad Khaled Sidiq, the head of the national TB programme also acknowledges that private and governmental hospitals fail to diagnose and treat the disease. “Unfortunately doctors don’t pay close attention and miss the symptoms of TB,” he says. He says that TB that is left untreated can kill the patient. Equally, patients who do not complete the course of treatment can become resistant to the cocktail of drugs. “Another reason for resistance to TB is the poor quality of medicines in the market. We can say that treatment of a patient who has become resistant to TB drugs can take up to two years and cost 8,000 USD,” says Sidiq.

TB is highly contagious. Women who rarely leave the four walls of their homes are very vulnerable to catching the infection. Rahima has been sick with TB for the last two years. She recalls that it all started with a bad case of flue and a breathing problem akin to asthma. “My cough continued for one month,” she recalls. For a while she tried to cure the cough with unani medicines but that did not help. A visit to a clinic confirmed she had TB. While she now feels better after a year of treatment, she says four of her children are infected. “We live in one room and my children sleep with me,” she says. Only her four-year-old son has not been infected, she adds.

Sidiq who heads the anti-TB programme says mothers who are infected generally pass on the infection to their children, particularly young children.

Esmatullah, 24, who has recovered from TB was treated in a government facility for two years. “The treatment in this clinic has been very effective but it took long because I am a government employee and skipped taking the medicines daily (consequently, developing resistance),” he says.

Lutfullah Manzoor who is the head of the teaching department under the national TB programme urges patients to visit the clinic daily for medicines in the first phase of treatment.

“Patient indifference (in taking the dose daily) can render the treatment infructuous. Patients forget to eat the medicines regularly so the treatment becomes useless,” says Dr Manzoor.