By Hassan Zaggi
The Country Director of HP+, Frances Ilika, has warned that if measures were not put in place to fund and control diseases of public health significance like HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis (TB), there could be a post-Covid-19 health crisis in Nigeria.
She lamented that this was particularly so as there is a huge funding gap for TB in Nigeria.
Ilika gave the warning during a Webinar media roundtable organized by Stop TB Partnership Nigeria, on Monday.
According to her: “If measures are not taken to address some of the key issues that we have with HIV, TB and Malaria, after Covid, there could be even a bigger crisis that will arise from these disease that are of public health significance,” she stressed.
On what to do to avert the looming health crisis, she said: “One of the things to do is the country ownership and leadership for TB approach.
“We are going to need the highest level of political commitment as well as commitment across all levels of all the people who work in and outside the health sector.
“While we focus on Covid, we need to also remember that we have other deadly diseases that are threatening us and can be further enabled by Covid.
“Domestic resources mobilization is key. We need to move away from dependent on donor funding for TB to actually improve our budget allocation for TB.
“A lot of effort is needed from the national level including from the parliamentarians and the executives to make sure that we provide adequate funding for TB and make sure that these funds are released both at the national and state levels and ensure that it goes down to the facility level where it can actually make impact at the community level.
“We need to also stimulate private sector investment.
We need policies on how we can actually integrate Covid and TB response so that as they are looking for Covid-19, we need to be looking for the TB cases.”
While noting that Nigeria has a huge gap of about 60 per cent of the required funding for TB and that the bulk of the funding was still donor dependent, she disclosed that it has been projected that it will take about 28.5 billion dollars to correct the effect of Covid on HIV, TB and Malaria.
Also speaking, the Medical Officer in charge of Tuberculosis (TB) at the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr. Ayodele Awe, has disclosed that TB kills more people than Covid, hence, needed to be given the required attention.
He also called on both states and local governments to emulate Kaduna state government by procuring mobile Gene Xpert machines which has the capacity to test Covid-19 and TB at the same time.
According to him, “each hour, there are 18 TB related deaths. 18 persons are dying of TB each hour and each day 430 persons are dying far more than Covid.
“Globally, it has shown that TB is a killer than Covid.
“We need the same type of Presidential Task Force on TB.
“The TB programme for the past two years has tried to stimulate the government to say, have a Presidential Task Force, lets bring people together. TB funding is very low it is only supported through Global Fund and partners.
“To catch up with what is happening on Covid, the Covid management in each state should liaise with the TB programme.
“We have structures on the ground that can even increase detection of Covid cases. This is because we have 12,000 dots centres in the country.
“We also need to increase the personal protective equipment so that our officers can have confidence to support the Covid.”
Dr. Awe revealed that Nigeria is still missing 300,000 new TB cases every year and only able to detect 25 per cent of the expected TB cases in the country.
On her part, the National Coordinator, National Tuberculosis, Leprosy Control Programme (NTBLCP), Dr Adebola Lawanson, said that messages that were churned out during the peak of the Covid adversely affected the fight against TB.
She explained that: “At the individual level, the health massaging that were introduce during the peak of Covid-19 for people to stay at home when they have symptoms was a paradox to the messaging on TB.
“This is because of for TB, we tell the patients to go to the hospital when they cough for two weeks or more to access free health care. But the stay at home massaging affected those with TB.
“It has reinforced stigma because a lot of people, some will decide to hide their cough so that people don’t mistake them for Covid.
“Also, because of the stay at home during Covid lockdown, there was increase in TB transmission.
“The lockdown during Covid-19 impacted negatively on TB because there was lack of access to healthcare facilities. People that were infected with TB that time that needed to be in the hospital were not hospitalized.
“Also, during the lock down, there was the possibility for the most simple TB to become drug resistant TB which ultimately increase the cost of treatment.”
She however, noted that the COVID-19 fight also had some advantages in the war against TB, including, “community approach in handling Covid, though it is not totally new, but it will help in TB.
“There was a lot of community approach for contact tracing for Covid, that also provided opportunity for us to track all forms of TB including drug resistant TB.
“Covid-19 also gave us the opportunity to renovate our laboratories.”
