The World Health Organisation says while there can be no quick fix for the tuberculosis epidemic in Papua New Guinea, work is being done to try and control the problem.
Transcript
The World Health Organisation says while there can be no quick fix for the tuberculosis epidemic in Papua New Guinea, work is being done to try and control the problem.
This comes as pressure from international activist groups mounts over an increasing number of people being infected with multi-drug resistant TB.
PNG is among the top 14 countries with a high burden of Tuberculosis with WHO estimates reporting almost 26,000 new infections in 2014 - 2000 of which were multi-drug resistant.
But the WHO representative in Papua New Guinea Pieter van Maaren told Koroi Hawkins an extensive programme already being rolled out targets multi-drug resistant TB.
PIETER VAN MAAREN: I a sense the drug resistant strain development is something that happens in almost all TV programs but what we have seen in Papua New Guinea is that this has spread further than what was expected. So in some provinces in Papua New Guinea and particularly Western Province we see quite a high rate of drug resistant tuberculosis.
KOROI HAWKINS: And are there any measures being put in place to address this? I guess the only way to address this is to have proper implementation or people taking the drugs at the right time and stopping cross infection and all of this.
PVM: Yes that is absolutely true this drug resistance problem has been know for some time and already measures have been put in place, started to be put in place many years ago. But given the extent of the problem the efforts have now been stepped up and that has also support from a range of development partners of which DFAT of Australia provides the largest financial contribution but it is really a government led program that is at the provincial level led by the provincial health office. But the entire control program that has been implemented follows exactly the global guidelines for Tuberculosis control and the programmatic management of drug resistant tuberculosis.
KH: And would you say there is an improving trend, a worsening trend or pretty much the same in terms of the way TB and the fight against it is going?
PVM: Well we believe with the efforts that have been made in the past two, three years and with the program that is on the ground right now we will see an improvement in the situation. I think it is too early to say that there is a dramatic improvement but we have all the measures in place on the ground to ensure that the control efforts are going to be successful. So I believe that yes we are on the right way. But as I mentioned earlier this is a long term problem that will require a long term investment and support so we are looking at both government support for a long duration but also the support and particularly financial support from development partners for you know we were talking about five to ten years from now in order to ensure that all the efforts that are now likely to be successful that they will remain successful.
Dr Pieter van Maaren says some indication of the difficulty of managing TB can be taken from Kiribati, which despite being tiny in size compared to Papua New Guinea continues to have an extremely high prevalence of the disease.
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