Fighting tuberculosis remains a challenge

Kazakhstan still faces a serious challenge in fighting tuberculosis (TB), despite infection rates dropping slightly in 2006, according to health officials.

“Kazakhstan is a country in which the problem of tuberculosis is quite acute, in terms of its spread,” Shakhimurat Ismailov, director of the National Centre for Tuberculosis Problems, told a press conference in Almaty, the Kazakh commercial capital, on Monday.

Figures from the national centre show that the rate of TB infection dropped from 165 cases per 100,000 people in 2002, to 147 per 100,000 in 2005, to 132 per 100,000 in 2006.

Kazbek Tulebayev, director of the National Centre for Problems of Healthy Lifestyle Development, said that TB incidence rates have shown a tendency to decrease, but added that “a great many problems remain”.

With 23,000 new cases of TB reported every year, officials say there is no room for complacency.

In late February, Kazakhstan launched a month-long nationwide prevention campaign under the slogan ‘Tuberculosis is Easier to Prevent than Cure’.

The campaign, which ends on World Tuberculosis Day on 24 March, focuses on awareness-raising, with an emphasis on early detection among children.

Instructions for spotting the disease have been issued to parents and medical staff, and schools have held special classes.

Over they years, such campaigns have borne fruit, with child infection rates having dropped from 39 cases per 100,000 in 2005 to 32 cases per 100,000 in 2006.

The government’s national strategy aims to stabilise TB rates in the country, with some US $125 million having been allocated to fight the disease over the past three years. Improving treatment and tackling social problems that contribute to the spread of the disease are also a priority.

Kazakhstan’s high rate of multi-drug resistant TB shows us that much work remains to be done.

“Fifty percent of tuberculosis patients are unemployed, and more than 50 percent [of them] do not have enough money to live on,” Ismailov said.

With half of all cases in Kazakhstan occurring among the 18-34 age bracket, officials are concerned about the infection’s long-term economic effect.

But the major concern is the rise of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, which already account for 40 percent of cases in Kazakhstan.

“Kazakhstan’s high rate of multi-drug resistant TB shows us that much work remains to be done,” said Kerry Pelzman, health and education office director for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Central Asia.

Government strategy focuses on ensuring uninterrupted treatment to prevent the spread of drug-resistant strains.

The Kazakh government pays for medicines to treat tuberculosis. Funding is adequate, Ismailov said, but the system to manage drug purchase and distribution needs improvement.

USAID has given some US $10 million to Kazakhstan over the past decade to combat the disease, and in 2006 the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria allocated US $9.8 million for TB control activities in the country.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), each year about 1.6 million people die from TB worldwide.

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