About 500,000 Indonesians infected with TB annually

JAKARTA (JP): Around 500,000 Indonesians are infected every year with tuberculosis and an estimated 175,000 die because their illness goes undetected, according to an official.

Hadi M. Abednego, director general for the prevention of communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health, told a media briefing here yesterday the government provides free medication to 150,000 TB patients through Puskesmas (public health centers) each year.

The media briefing was held to raise awareness of World Tuberculosis Day, which falls on March 24.

Abednego was quoted by Antara as saying that 80 percent of TB patients came from lower income families and the productive age group of 15 to 54 years.

He said the high mortality from the disease was due to ignorance of the possibility of medical treatment, the stigma attached to the disease and the fact that many patients lived in remote areas.

The government has equipped 25,000 Puskesmas across the country with binocular microscopes as part of its drive to eradicate the disease. A further 728 clinics have been trained to handle TB patients in remote areas.

Abednego said tuberculosis was now second only to heart disease as the most common cause of death in Indonesia. The spread of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which TB often accompanies as a secondary infection, could be a major cause of the increasing number of deaths from the disease, he said in a seminar.

"With the appearance of HIV/AIDS across the globe, (tuberculosis) has reemerged. AIDS victims lose their resistance to TB," he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said a number of countries, including Indonesia, had failed to properly combat the illness in a report published earlier this week.

The report said Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, South Africa and Thailand possess sufficient funds but are not doing enough to tackle the disease. The WHO says that implementing the Directly Observed Treatment, Short course (DOTS) program could bring the disease under control.

A further eight countries named in the report - Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Uganda - have very little money to spend on health. In some of these countries the success rate for treating TB is falling.

A number of tuberculosis "hot-spots" exist in Indonesia, including East Nusa Tenggara, Kalimantan, southern Sulawesi, Riau and Aceh, Hadi said. In some of these areas, TB rates of infection are as high as 12 per 10,000 inhabitants.

There are currently seven million cases of the lung disease worldwide, the WHO report said. Sixty four percent of known infections are in Asia.

Annual deaths from he disease are rising. Currently, about 3 million people die from the disease every year. The disease is spread by coughing and sneezing. (swe)