Survey to establish Botswana's TB burden
Mpho Mokwape | Wednesday April 3, 2019 15:47
The survey, which is the first of its kind in the country, has been merged with the HIV/AIDS and will be conducted under the term ‘The 5th Botswana AIDS Impact V and Tuberculosis Prevalence Survey’. It is reportedly the first time the two surveys have been merged in the country and globally.
When launching the survey on Tuesday, Health minister, Dr Alfred Madigele said to date Botswana has never had a tuberculosis impact survey despite it being responsible for 13% of all adults’ death and 40% of deaths amongst people living with HIV.
Madigele explained that it was important that the country and global community combine the HIV/AIDS programmes with TB since the latter remains a major threat.
“TB remains a major threat to public health worldwide and the most common opportunistic infection among people living with HIV,” he said.
Madigele noted that through the Botswana National Tuberculosis Programme (BNTP), the country was one of the 55 countries, which faithfully continue to collect and report TB data to World Health Organisation since 1980.
He added that the country has conducted over four national drug resistance surveys that demonstrated an increase in new cases of Multi Drug Resistance (MDR-TB) from 0.2% in 1995 to 2.5 percent in 2008.
“The latest WHO estimates on MDR-TB for Botswana are 3.6% amongst new cases and 13% among re-treatment cases,” he said.
“To date the promotion of TB patients amongst people presenting with HIV infection in health care facilities is about 60%.”
Meanwhile, the survey that is conducted by National AIDS and Health Promotion (NAHPA) formerly known as National AIDS Coordinating Agency and Statistics Botswana as main technical partners will give data on the burden of HIV/AIDS and TB on the country.
According to NAHPA the goal of the survey is amongst others to examine the distribution of HIV in the country, to determine point prevalence of bacteriological confirmed pulmonary TB. It will also assess health-seeking behaviour for TB related symptoms of individuals aged 15 years and above.
Also amongst others the survey process is expected to be done through household interviews, blood collection, chest x-rays, sputum collection and rapid HIV testing.