World TB day marked in PNG with discussion on how to stop the disease
Updated
March 24 was World Tuberculosis day, and Scientists, health bureaucrats and aid organisations gathered in Port Moresby to discuss the disease, which claims about three-thousand lives every year in Papua New Guinea. The disease is easily curable but detection rates are low and access to treatment is limited especially in rural areas.
Presenter Liam Fox
Speaker: PNG Health Secretary Clement Malau
- Listen:
- Windows Media
MALAU: There is a cultural basis to lack of understanding of disease, the TB disease itself, and our own systematic problems in the health systems not providing drugs on time, reliability of drugs being there all the time, staff training, we need staff to be trained so that they are able to diagnose properly. So it's a whole lot of problems, the costs of getting medicines out there, and the poor infrastructure, so a whole lot of things add to the problem of TB.
FOX: It seems like a massive problem there. Are you able to tackle it, can you foresee a time when you can tackle it?
MALAU: Well, I really am optimistic, that if we get the systems right, starting with the very basics. Get our human resource plans done properly, get the assets and the equipment properly planned for, properly maintained, this goes for laboratory equipment like microscopes and so on, if we use our technology to our advantage, if we train our people appropriately, get the budgets right, get the governance systems right, I'm pretty optimistic we can manage the problem for the long term.
FOX: I heard here this morning, there is an aim to have the basic DOTs program rolled out across the country by October this year, can you tell me about that aim?
MALAU: Well, the DOT, Direct Observe Treatment short course, that program I think is going pretty well, with the support obviously from the global fund. The problem is getting the people focused, getting the health systems focused, getting the provinces focused on their objectives, on the national objective. It's how we sensitise the provinces, it's how we get them engaged to implement. Because we at national level only set standards and policies and guidelines, so how we engage with them will be a major challenge. But I am quietly optimistic that they could reach that objective of October, 2009.
FOX: And how is the prevalence of HIV affecting TB?
MALAU: Yes, that is a serious problem. We do have close to 12-13% of all TB patients, we are finding them to be HIV positive, and that is a serious problem. Again the mixture of TB with HIV, the implications for the normal person in society, in the village, sometimes associated with sorcery. So all those sort of beliefs and practices we need to look at critically and address.
