JEDDAH, 26 March 2008 — The Health Ministry launched a yearlong national campaign yesterday to encourage early tuberculosis diagnosis.
“The strategy of the national tuberculosis control program has succeeded to fulfill all targeted aims, including early diagnosis, free treatment and eliminating fatalities from the disease,” said Dr. Naila Abu Al-Jadayel, the program’s coordinator in the Makkah Region. She said Saudi Arabia is on a par with the world’s advanced countries in the area of tuberculosis eradication.
Dr. Tawfik Khoja, director general of the Executive Board of the Council of Health Ministers of GCC states, said the real worry now is the spread of drug-resistant TB that is hard to cure even with advanced medications. “Patients who have this kind of TB must be treated with drugs that are expensive for longer periods of 18 to 24 months,” he said.
According to him, a study covering 90,000 patients between 2002 and 2006 showed that the high drug-resistant TB has spread in 45 countries, most of them in the developing world.
Abu Al-Jadayel said the Health Ministry has a program that targets health care workers through seminars and trainings on how to apply the TB-control program.
The campaign started a day after World TB Day on March 24. The WHO has set a 2015 deadline to decrease TB cases and deaths from the infection by half.
According to the WHO, there are 500,000 drug-resistant TB cases annually, or five percent of TB cases worldwide. There are nine million TB cases registered annually, mostly in Third World countries of Africa and Asia.
An estimated 1.5 million people died from TB in 2006.
