By Kuda Pembere
Zimbabwe recently began a survey to sasses the burden of Multiple-drug resistance TB in the country amidst the background of low case detection, a Ministry of Health and Child Care Official said.
Addressing delegates at an ICASA side event on TB, Zimbabwe’s Health ministry TB/HIV officer Mr Manners Ncube said one of the measures they are implementing to improve case detection, particularly in MDR TB is a survey.
And then MDR TB case detections, 35 percent. But when you reference now to the TB in general of 81 percent, we see sort of there’s some discrepancy there. Because we know that case finding for DRTP is nested within the conventional TB case finding. So that is why currently we are in the process of, we have just started the process of a DRR survey to just appreciate better the burden of MDRR-TP, of DRR-TP in the population, to better align our targets to the real burden that is there,” he said.
He said they have been off track from the benchmarked TB case-finding targets.
“So TB Prevention Therapy (TPT) for PLHIV, I think for those who attended a session on Monday, it was highlighted that Zimbabwe performed very well on this indicator. But for the rest of the indicators, not as good. We didn’t reach the target for TB case detection. We’re at 81 percent, and childhood TB 67 percent. And for childhood TB we expect to get some cases, at least from the index cases that we have identified during contact investigation,” Mr Ncube said.
Mr Ncube also noted that they began using stool samples to test for TB in children to skirt the challenge of testing TB in children. For adults, experts say, they use sputum which is difficult to obtain from children.
“So because of leakages and some other challenges investigations were missing these children. Even in terms of specimens for testing for tipping children we had issues. So recently we adopted the use of stool and did necessary capacity building and this is something that is still new relatively,” he said.
