The World Health Organisation has called on Africa governments to increase their investment on Tuberculosis to cut down on new cases and accelerate the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious killer.
According to WHO, each day, nearly 4,500 people lose their lives to TB and close to 30,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease.
At a high-level UN meeting on TB in September 2018, world leaders vowed to end TB by 2030.
To this end, African leaders are therefore, challenged to fulfill their pledge by providing adequate care to TB patients through funding for core TB control services .
In a statement to mark this year’s World TB Day, WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, maintained that to end TB in the region , African governments needed to increase their investment on the killer disease, stressing that their current spending was below the levels required to end the epidemic by the end date of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030.
The World TB Day is observed March 24 each year. The day was set aside to create public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of the disease.
The theme of this year’s World TB Day is “It’s time to end TB.”
Despite killing nearly as many people each year as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, there has been no new, commercially available vaccine in the past seven decades for the chronic lung disease.
Moeti said African leaders need to increase their investment in care and prevention of the disease. According to her, core TB control services should be funded from domestic resources, and universal health coverage introduced to ensure quality assured preventative, diagnostic, treatment and care services.
She said though the 2018 WHO global report shows that there has been a decrease in the disease burden globally, many African countries were not fast enough to reach the first milestones of the End TB Strategy in 2020.
Moeti urged political leaders and national governments to adopt policies and programmatic actions to foster a multisectoral response to end the epidemic. She also urged international partners for continued technical and financial support in the fight against TB and related conditions.
