MANILA -- The government plans to scale up its screening and testing methods in the hope of finding and treating all Filipinos with tuberculosis (TB) by 2022, an official of the Department of Health (DOH) said Wednesday.
The World Health Organization said a total of one million Filipinos or one percent of the national population have active TB and many among them do not even know that they are carriers of the disease.
Around 27,000 Filipinos annually or 70 Filipinos daily die from TB, which is supposed to be a highly-curable disease.
DOH Undersecretary and Public Health Service Team officer-in-charge Myrna Cabotaje said the agency is now geared towards "actively finding TB cases" through massive screening using chest X-ray, massive bacteriological tests, massive treatment using quality drugs and massive preventive treatment using quality drugs with the guidance of the WHO.
"It is important that we have notifications. When these cases are notified, they're able to receive treatment, and follow up, and through the universal health care law, they'll be provided treatment," she said during a press conference in Pasay City.
Referring to the high prevalence rate of TB in the country, Cabotaje said the government did not do enough "for the Philippines to be considered the epicenter of the TB epidemic".
"Looking at the number, the 581,000 Filipinos who fell ill with TB starting 2017, I think from the Philippines and DOH perspective, we did not do anything wrong. We did not do enough," she said.
Cabotaje attributed the government's passive effort in finding TB cases to lack of resources and attention to the connection between TB and children.
"We didn't act strongly on TB and children before because we thought if you have strong DOTS (directly observed treatment short-course) for the adult TB, the children will not be affected. But, we see it differently now," she said.
She added that the development of drug-resistant TB is another factor to the issue.
"Before, it is said if you have good DOTS, there'll be no multi-drug resistance (MDR) TB, but we're finding that the microbe is also becoming intelligent. We're finding out that even without previous TB treatment, we find MDR (TB), meaning from the beginning the microbe is already resistant from first line drugs," she said.
According to the 2018 WHO TB Report, TB is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and it is the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent.
In 2017, there were about 1.3 million TB deaths and additional 300,000 among people with human immunodeficiency virus.
At the United Nations High Level Meeting on TB in New York in September 2018, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III stressed that the government is committed to ending TB nationwide.
He said the DOH plans to achieve this through the high-level National Coordination Committee activation, X-ray screening and rapid molecular testing and mandatory notifications by all care providers.
Guy Marks, vice president of The Union, a group of community volunteers, health experts and rural health care providers advancing solutions to public health challenges affecting the poor, said there is no explanation as to why TB is more prevalent in the Philippines compared to other countries.
"We can't answer why, because the science behind this doesn't explain why there's a high burden of TB in the Philippines, South Africa, very high burden in India and Indonesia compared to other countries, but we can say what must be done to address it. And we're very pleased to hear that the steps taken by the Department of Health here are in the right direction," he said.
Marks said many factors could be involved such as the country's social structure, economic situation, prevalence of risk factors and approaches in treating the disease.
"What we know though, there's a way to dealing with it, that's to be much more active and aggressive in finding the people with the disease, not waiting for them to come to you, finding and treating them before they can spread the disease to other people," he said. (PNA)
