The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : New campaign against tuberculosis launched

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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

New campaign against tuberculosis launched

Staff Reporter

Aim is to rope in media to create better awareness among the public

– S. Mahinsha

Health action: Health Minister P.K. Sreemathy speaking at the launch of ‘Speak Up to Stop TB,’ a media advocacy campaign, in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday.

Thiruvananthapuram: Tuberculosis continues to claim two lives every three minutes in the country though India has one of the most forceful TB control programmes. There was an urgent need for all stake holders — the public and private sector doctors, the public, celebrities and the media — to come together and generate more awareness on TB, it was stressed at a meeting to launch a media advocacy campaign against TB here on Wednesday.

The campaign, ‘Speak Up to Stop TB,’ a joint initiative of REACH (Resource Group for Education and Advocacy for Community Health), a Chennai-based NGO working in areas critical to community health and Lilly MDR TB Partnership, a global health initiative of Eli Lilly and Company, was launched here by Health Minister P.K. Sreemathy.

Apart from sensitising media to the challenges before the national TB control programme, the campaign is an attempt to sustain media interest in the issue by encouraging human interest stories linked to TB and participating in the blog in the website www.media4tb.org, created exclusively for the media. This initiative has been launched in all Southern metros.

Ms. Sreemathy said that the initiative would help the media create better awareness on TB among the public. She said that media reports on health issues had a big influence on the public.

The Minister pointed out that though people knew that TB was curable, the disease still evoked fear in them. Kerala had made great strides in TB control, but it still had to deal with many issues. There were few NGOs willing to work in areas like TB control, she said, assuring REACH all support for its endeavours in Kerala.

Nalini Krishnan, Director (Projects) of REACH, said that TB should be considered a public health problem because incomplete or improper treatment of one TB patient could lead to 10-15 people getting infected. “Co-existence of HIV and TB infections and the increasing prevalence of multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR TB) were the two major challenges that the national TB control programme is trying to tackle. In India, TB is the primary opportunistic infection that affects HIV-positive persons. Often they died of TB before the HIV infection progressed,” she said.

Despite an effective drug regimen under the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), indiscriminate prescription of second-line TB drugs by doctors and incomplete treatment were fuelling drug resistance, Dr. Krishnan said, adding that medical practitioners should know how multi-drug resistance can be prevented.

Sunil Kumar, Medical Officer, State TB Cell, who presented an overview of RNTCP in the State, pointed out that by the ninth year of RNTCP, Kerala could reduce death rate due to TB from 24 per cent to 5 per cent. The TB transmission rate in Kerala was also one of the lowest in the country, according to the latest Annual Risk of TB Infection survey, he added. Ramya Ananthakrishnan, Medical Director of REACH, and C. Gouridasan Nair, Senior Assistant Editor of The Hindu, also spoke.

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