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The recorded incidence of tuberculosis (TB) has doubled in the last five years, and the disease now poses a real threat, the Rwanda News Agency (RNA) reported on Monday. “TB is increasing with the AIDS rate. This requires effective TB programmes, with adequate resources ... the most productive and economically active portion of the population are being hit,” RNA quoted Dr Karibushi Blaise, the doctor in charge of Rwanda’s TB and leprosy campaigns, as saying. In 1999, the recorded incidence of TB in government hospitals was 6,557 Rwandans, up from 3,057 in 1995, the report stated, adding that an estimated 45 to 40 percent of all new TB cases in Africa were accompanied by an underlying HIV infection.
UNICEF last week described TB as “one of the most seriously neglected and underestimated health, human rights and poverty problems of our era”. Inadequate TB treatment services and incorrect self-treatment, where patients began but did not complete a course of treatment, threatened to usher in a “humanitarian and epidemiological disaster” of widespread multi-drug resistant TB, UNICEF added.
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