Create awareness to check TB menace
Speakers at a workshop yesterday said media should play more active role to create awareness about diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis that involves physical, social and economic factors.
Treatment of TB, a highly contagious disease, is a challenge in Bangladesh that has the sixth largest number of TB patients in the world, speakers said at the workshop styled 'Tuberculosis control: Present perspective and future plan' held at Brac Centre Inn in the capital.
National TB Control Programme under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Brac and Health Reporters Forum jointly organised the workshop.
Left without treatment, 50 per cent of TB patients die, 25 per cent get cured naturally while remaining 25 per cent continue to spread the disease among others, speakers said.
Mass awareness is needed to rein in spread of the contagious disease as patients diagnosed with TB at the early stage can get cured easily through proper treatment, they said.
However, as patients are mostly from poor and uneducated classes of the society, they often give up taking medicine before completion of the course that continues for months.
Those patients become vulnerable to MDR (multi-drug resistant) TB that requires more complicated and longer treatment.
National TB control programme in being conducted in all the upazilas and metropolitan and pourasava areas throughout the country with coordinated efforts of government and non-government organisations.
Dr Mahfuza Rifat of Brac Health Programme and Dr Asif Mujtaba Mahmud, associate professor of respiratory medicine at NIDC&H presented the keynote papers.
Dr Abdul Awal Matin, programme manager of National TB Control Programme, was the main discussant at the workshop moderated by Monjurul Ahsan Bulbul.
National page in-charges of different dailies attended the workshop where Moniruzzaman Ujjal, president of Health Reporters Forum, presided.
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