Ghana records increasing multi resistant Tuberculosis cases

It is disturbing Ghana is currently recording 640 new cases per year in a new form of tuberculosis cases.

That’s according to the Chairman for the Wealth Health Organization Child Tuberculosis Task force, Dr. Anthony Enimil who describes it as dangerous.

He describe the cases as Multi Resistant Tuberculosis.

Ghana is a Tb endemic country, 14, 632 cases were diagnosed and put on treatment in 2015.

The National Tuberculosis Program says 77 cases of Multi Resistant TB in 2016 up from 60 recorded in 2015 being treated.

Out of the number 12 have died, 15 declared cured while 51 are still on treatment.

National Tuberculosis Program began enrollment of Multidrug Resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases onto treatment in 2012 which currently has about 182 patients being treated.

Dr. Enimil explains ordinary stage of the disease takes six months but at that stage the organisms are not dead, they are dormant and must be taken seriously.

“The dangerous part is if you don’t complete and cough on people, The TB strain you are giving to people is not the six months but 20 months including 8 months of injection. This makes it dangerous and we are all at risk”, he worriedly said.

TB ranks alongside HIV/AIDS as the leading cause of death worldwide. TB/HIV Co-infection Rate currently stands at 22 per cent according to the World Health Organisaton (WHO).

Statistics from the National Prevalence Survey, averagely 122 new TB cases develop every day in Ghana.

Out of that 27 people die putting the figure averagely to one person dying every day in Ghana.

The current surveillance system is detecting about 54.2 per 100,000 putting Case Detection Rate (CDR) at 33 per cent.

“We use not to have it in Ghana but now Multidrug resistant is in Ghana, almost 2 per cent of all our cases now are MDR Tb.”

Treatment of drug resistant TB is very difficult and expensive because it lasts for 2 years including minimum 8 months of injections daily.

As Ghana joins other countries to observe the International Tuberclosis Day, Dr. Enimil wants people with TB trait to report to the hospital for free diagnosis and treatment.

The theme for this year’s celebration is ‘Unite to End TB’. The call is for stakeholders to unite towards achieving the goal of TB elimination by 2035.