Africa-Press – Zambia. Minister of Health, Sylvia Masebo, says Zambia has made tremendous progress in the response to the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic in the past two decades.
Ms. Masebo said during the period under review, the country has reduced TB related deaths by 64 percent. Ms. Masebo however, said in spite of the progress made, TB remains a disease of public health concern in Zambia and globally.
She added that Zambia has since been classified as one of the 30 high TB burden countries in the world. ZANIS reports that Ms. Masebo was speaking during the launch of the nationwide active TB case finding in Kitwe yesterday.
She disclosed that 4,000 lives are lost as a result of TB every year. “In 2018, Zambia participated in the first ever United Nations (UN) high level meeting on tuberculosis, where heads of state and government pledged to find and treat 40 million people with TB between 2018 and 2022,” she said.
Ms. Masebo said Zambia has so far treated 165,412 cases of tuberculosis but expressed concerned with the performance in detecting TB in children. She stressed the need to accelerate efforts in TB case findings in order for the country not to continue losing precious lives of children, adolescents, women and men.
She stated that the new dawn government is committed to ensuring that the country achieves a milestone and ambitious target towards eliminating TB in Zambia by 2030.
“This is why the government increased the budget allocation to the health sector which will also support the recruitment of 11,200 health workers and this is showing the commitment to delivering quality health services to all Zambians,” she said.
Ms. Masebo, who is also Chongwe Member of Parliament, explained that the government will continue to invest in newer diagnostic tools to direct tuberculosis in order to shorten the turnaround time.
She expressed gratitude to all cooperating and implementing partners, especially the global fund, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Japanese Tuberculosis Association and all civil society organisations.
And Chief of Party for Eradicating TB, a USAID funded project, Victoria Musonda, appreciated the conducive environment that the government has provided to enhance support and collaboration to the national TB programme.
Dr. Musonda has since urged the government to establish the national TB resource mobilisation platform through private sector engagement so that there is an increase in the national pool of locally generated resources available to eliminate TB by 2030.
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