(MENAFN- Muscat Daily) Muscat- The World Health Organization has called on governments to work together and act towards ending tuberculosis.
Dr Ahmed al Mandhari, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean who was speaking on the occasion of World TB Day, urged all affected communities, civil society organisations, healthcare providers and national/international partners to detect and treat all tuberculosis cases so that no one is left behind.
World Tuberculosis Day is commemorated every year on March 24 to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of the disease, urge national policy - and decision-makers to scale up efforts to eliminate TB and step up efforts to end the global epidemic.
TB is one of the top-10 leading causes of death globally and yet it is both curable and preventable. The theme of this year's campaign is 'It's time for action! It's time to end TB' and it emphasises the urgent need to act on the commitments made by heads of state and governments in the first-ever United Nations General Assembly Political Declaration 'United to End Tuberculosis: An Urgent Global Response to a Global Epidemic'.
The declaration reflects the high-level commitment to scale up access to prevention and treatment, build accountability, ensure sufficient and sustainable financing, including for research, promote an end to stigma and discrimination and support an equitable, rights-based and people-centred TB response.
TB is a highly contagious disease and the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. Globally, 10mn people developed TB in 2017 and it caused an estimated 1.6mn deaths. In the Eastern Mediterranean Region, the number of people who developed TB in 2017 exceeds 750,000, and among those about four per cent had drug-resistant TB.
Significant efforts have been exerted globally to eliminate TB and at the regional level significant progress has been made in fighting the disease in the past few years. 'Despite challenges, WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region achieved the highest treatment success rates among drug-sensitive, as well as drug-resistant TB cases, 92 per cent and 62 per cent, respectively,' said Dr Mandhari.
However, more action is needed to translate commitments into concrete actions to address the key challenges.
Finding missing TB cases, addressing the multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB crisis and TB among children, fostering public–private partnership and establishing enabling environments to reach end TB targets are the main global challenges to be addressed.
In the region, in addition to the above challenges, there is an urgent need to focus on scaling up diagnosis and notification. One third of TB cases are either undiagnosed or not notified to national tuberculosis programmes, while 80 per cent of people with drug-resistant TB are not detected.
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