The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Tuberculosis Local Organizations Network (TB LON 3) project has been commended for assisting states in south west Nigeria to battle Tuberculosis.
The Director Technical Programs, Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) Dr. Olugbenga Daniel, gave the commendation in an interview with Gloria Essien, in Abuja.
“The project operating in the South West, known as Region 3 of the project intervention, has the overall aim to find the missing TB cases in the states.
“It is rightly projected, annually Nigeria is expected to identify over 400,000 TB cases precisely about 432,000, but in the last 5 – 6 years Nigeria has been hovering around 100,000.
“Nigeria has the highest TB prevalence in Africa, 6th in the world, and this has been a huge concern to all the major players in public health across the world, as you know TB is the no 1 infectious disease killer worldwide, higher than HIV, higher than malaria.
“Considering the population of Nigeria, it of utmost importance that we do as much as we can to eliminate TB in Nigeria and across the world,” he said.
The USAID TB LON project is a five-year project spanning from 2020 to 2025. It is designed to complement and accelerate the ongoing activities, being implemented by the Government and as well as all the various partners that are already implementing in the field of TB across the country.
Dr.. Daniel said, the highest achievement of the project was in the year 2020 where it was able to identify 132,000 TB cases which is a 17% increase over what was actually achieved in 2019.
He also said that the number of patients that are missing in the country was really a huge source of concern as a single TB patient eventually infects about 15 people.
Basically, this entails active engagement of the community gate-keepers, the leaders in the community and also put into play strategies that get patients screened at the comfort of their homes.
“So, we do house to house search, we do contact investigation, every identified TB case has close contact, those relatives that reside in the same abode and these are people that over the time would be infected and will develop the disease subsequently.”
The project also strengthens the diagnostic capacity, because TB is actually a disease that is diagnosed in the laboratory.
“We have a general challenge in the country, our diagnostic capacity is suboptimal and for the TB LON grant, we were able to strengthen a number of labs, build their capacity, provide infrastructure and strengthen the linkages between the facilities where patients are screened and then referred for investigations,” he said.
Based on the impact of COVID-19, rather than for the awareness to bring people more to the facility, it scared them away and rather had a drop in OPD attendance, clinic attendance and hospital attendance because an average person believed that if you bring him to the facility during the pandemic, you are bringing him to the isolation centre to be isolated and declared a COVID patient.
The stigma scared people from the facility. It really had a huge impact on patients that presented at the facility and the facility intervention which is screening 100% of the OPD attendees, it is 100% of those that presented themselves at the facility that ended up been screened.
Questions related to cough were delayed until after being able to put the patient at ease. You ask a familiar question before going to cough because it just turns them off.
The Director Technical also explained that there were a number of community strategies that were adopted for TB finding but the game changer among them all was an artificial intelligence platform that was developed in conjunction with a foreign company called Hotspot Mapping.
It uses various variables, the population density, the sex distribution, the HIV prevalence, the poverty level and even the availability of electricity to determine the prevalence of TB in that community.
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