HA NOI — Viet Nam plans to eliminate tuberculosis (TB) by 2030. The National Tuberculosis Prevention (NTP) Programme yesterday revealed its strategy for the next five years to reduce the prevalence of TB by half of the estimated incidence in 2000. It also aims to keep the multi-drug resistance (MDR) rate steady between now and 2015.
"TB epidemiology in Viet Nam is still higher than the previous estimation of health experts. Thus, a significant number of TB cases remain undiagnosed or unreported and will continuously be sources of transmission," said NTP Director Dinh Ngoc Sy.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, Viet Nam still ranks 12th among 22 TB high burden countries and ranks 14th among 27 countries with a high burden of MDR-TB. The NTP estimated that Viet Nam has about 200,000 TB cases of all forms, of which nearly 100,000 are new cases.
The number of TB cases detected and treated consistently remains under 60 per cent of new cases annually. MDR-TB is about 20 per cent of previously treated TB patients.
Viet Nam will have to mobilise about US$250 million of the total budget of $340 million from local and international donors to implement the National Tuberculosis Prevention Programme (NTP) in the next five years, Sy said.
"The State funding for the tuberculosis prevention programme only satisfied about 30 per cent of the budget requirement," he said.
The NTP said TB prevention activities have faced many challenges due to inadequate budget, lack of human resources, legal shortcomings, a weak health system and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The programme period 2011-15 targets objectives that ensure access to and provision of equitable, high-quality and basic directly observed treatment (DOT) services at all levels of the healthcare system; address TB/HIV, MDR-TB and TB control in prisons; integrate NTP into the health system; and mobilise the involvement of all economic sectors in the NTP fight. WHO estimates there are about 2 million new TB cases, 93 per cent of which are in Viet Nam, the Philippines, Cambodia and China. In fact, 260,000 people die from TB each year in the Western Pacific region. — VNS
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