Kenyan official blames poverty, HIV/AIDS on upsurge of TB crisis

High prevalence of HIV/AIDS, high poverty levels and rapid growth of the urban poor population has contributed to the upsurge of tuberculosis in Kenya, a senior official disclosed here Friday.

Kenya's Assistant Minister for Health Wilfred Machage, however, said Kenya has outlined its emergence plan for controlling the preventable disease, saying a comprehensive approach to TB control is in place aimed at delivering the new Stop TB Strategy that will help the country to derive towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for TB by 2015.

Machage said that unless urgent extraordinary actions were undertaken to address the current trend of the epidemic the situation will not only get worse but might also compromise the Abuja and MDGs targets.

"In Kenya there were 10,000 cases a year in the early 1980's and close to 106,000 cases in 2004. It is also estimated that over 74,000 people a year or 200 people a day die of TB and thus TB is an emergency in Kenya," Machange told journalists during the celebrations to mark the World Tuberculosis Day in Nairobi.

Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria, which attack the lungs, but can also infect any part of the body.

If left untreated, an infected person will pass it on to an estimated 10-15 people.

The disease is airborne, but sunlight and good ventilation can drastically decrease infection rates according to health experts.

Of the two million people who die from TB every year in the world, 1.5 million are Africans.

"TB control is moving from a focused, selective approach to involvement of a wider range of actors. Besides the urgent need to work with HIV/AIDS programs on TB/HIV, and laboratory services on Multi Drug Resistant TB, the public-private mix (PPM) approach is promising new initiative for delivering low cost, quality treatment to TB patients," said Machage.

Source: Xinhua