Health ministry turns to VHTs in new TB campaign

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Health has launched a new campaign in which they will use Village Health Teams (VHTs) to look for people with symptoms of Tuberculosis (TB) and link them to care.

The campaign which starts this month, according to Dr. Patrick Tusiime, the Commissioner of National Disease Control at the Ministry of Health will involve offering TB preventive medication for contacts of cases and doing random tests in the community. He says this campaign will be carried out every six months without interrupting routine TB services at the government health facilities.

Dr. Stavia Turyahabwe, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the TB and Leprosy Programme says they have resolved to make this campaign more regular after a previous similar initiative done in March that helped them pick a lot of people who were living with disease unaware.

The majority were picked from Karamoja, Lango, and Acholi areas. In Karamoja for instance, she says prevalence is ten times higher than national prevalence.

In the first campaign, although it was supposed to be countrywide, Turyahabwe says they managed to reach one hundred and twelve districts with the campaign to test people from where they are. Then they used both sputum and X-ray tests where samples were picked from their homes.

However, while they thought they would train one VHT per village to help them with the work, they only managed to get a few of them to participate. Of the 70,000 VHTs, they only got 26,000 involved.

However, while there has been a lot of effort to curb TB with a lot of donor funding from Global Fund and others directed towards the disease, Uganda is still considered a high burden country for both TB and TB-HIV co-infection rates with thirty percent of the people living with HIV also battling TB.

In terms of prevalence, every 200 Ugandans out of the 100,000 population are positive with over a thousand people battling the more complicated drug-resistant TB which cannot be treated with basic treatment regimens.

Even in the previous survey, Turyahabwe says they picked a lot of people, especially in the Busoga region with drug-resistant types. She however couldn’t reveal the exact numbers.

Dr. Mary Nabukenya Mudiope, a Chief of Party of the USAID TB project says the new innovation of going to the people and treating them from within their communities through mobile services will help the country cut down on the burden and also make progress to be able to hit global targets for ending both TB as a public health threat by 2030.

*****

URN