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From Rose Ejembi, Makurdi
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) Nigeria, on Thursday, joined the rest of the world to celebrate the World Tuberculosis (TB) Day 2022 with a call on everyone to invest to end tuberculosis and save lives.
The Foundation gathered youths from across Benue State to stage a walk in Makurdi the state capital to create awareness on the need to stop the stigmatization of TB patients.
Speaking at its office in Makurdi, AHF’s Antiritroviral therapy physician/ site coordinator, Avater Aondohemba who described TB as an infection affecting the low and middle income countries mostly in Africa lamented the increasing rate of TB infections in the world.
“Worldwide, we have between eight million to nine million TB cases every year with about 1.5 million deaths out of which we have 100,000 children deaths yearly.
“We want to avoid stigma and so, we therefore call on patients who have cough for more than two weeks to report to the nearest health facility to get tested and be treated,” Aondohemba said.
On his part, Prevention Manager, AHF Nigeria, Taofeek Adeleye, said the Foundation is raising awareness to let people know that TB is preventable, curable and treatable.
“One of the things we are doing is to raise awareness about TB to let people understand that TB is preventable, curable and treatable. As an organization that focuses on HIV services, it’s important for us to know that we have TB/HIV coinfections which is actually heavier.
“Coming from the background that we have more than 500 new cases of TB in Nigeria every year, it’s important for us to encourage our clients to be wary of TB by ensuring that HIV clients enrol in care. Part of what we do is enrol them on preventive therapy for tuberculosis to reduce their chances of being infected with TB and perhaps other opportunistic infections.
“You know HIV is an immune compromise infection and TB also has the same characteristics. When you have somebody who is infected with HIV also coming down with TB, it makes it quite challenging to handle such case at the clinical stage.”
Also speaking, Benue State nursing coordinator for AHF, Ruth Atabor who listed the symptoms of TB to include cough and night sweat among others said anyone with such symptoms can quickly approach any health facility to be screened.
“TB can be prevented and can also be cured. One who has symptoms of TB such as cough, night sweat and the rest of them can be screened. When someone is screened and is positive, that person can be referred for TB testing which is free. All a patient needs to do is to just walk into any government health facility and get tested for free.
TB testing and treatment is free and like I said earlier, TB is preventable and is curable. But the incidence rate of TB in persons that are coinfected with HIV is very high and the death ratio is one in three. That means one out of three HIV patients infected with TB dies.
“For us in AHF, once you come to our facility and you have those symptoms, we screen you and if you are screen positive, we send you to a place where you will do your TB test and if your test is positive, we immediately place you on treatment.
“Also, there’s what we call the latent phase of TB and then the active phase. When you are in that latent phase, you can have TB and if you are not immune compromised, the TB might not be active.
“But someone who has HIV is immune compromised. So, that TB becomes active and is highly infectious at that stage. And because of how TB is very infectious, we do what we call contact tracing and we try to start that person on drugs on time. That’s why we said that early diagnosis and early treatment help to prevent the spread of TB.
Atabor who noted that it takes between six to 12 months for a TB patient to complete treatment, insisted that TB is curable with the right treatment even as she urged the general public to end the stigma against TB.
