World Health Organization declares TB an emergency in Africa

August 25, 2005

The World Health Origination (WHO) declared tuberculosis an emergency in Africa. This disease since 1990 has quadrupled in the annual number of people contracting the disease. It kills more than half a million people a year. Tuberculosis is second to HIV/AIDS as a cause of illness and death of adults only 11% of the world’s population has this disease but more than a quarter of them live in Africa. The Regional Committee called for specific actions to address this emergency they included:

•improve the quantity and quality of staff involved in TB control;
•rapidly improve TB case detection and treatment success rates with expanded DOTS coverage at national and district levels;
•reduce the combined TB patient default and transfer out rates to 10% or less;
•scale up interventions to manage TB and HIV together, including increased access to anti-retroviral therapy for TB patients who are co-infected with HIV, and to chemoprophylaxis against TB for people with HIV;
•expand national TB partnerships, public-private collaboration and community participation in TB control activities.

These specific actions came off of the website http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/africa_emergency/en/index.html