A national plan for the control of tuberculosis was launched yesterday, as Malta joined the rest of the world in a drive to halve the prevalence of the infectious disease in three years’ time.
Although Malta is classified as a low TB incidence country, the national strategy aims to eradicate the bacteria by 2050, in linewith World Health Organisation objectives.
The plan was launched as the world yesterday rememberedchild victims of what is a fatal but curable disease.
Childhood TB is rare in Malta. There were only seven registered cases in the past 10 years and four of these were found in migrant children.
The most common incidence of TB among Maltese is a reactivation of the disease in the elderly – particularly those who were affected by it during the Second World War.
More than three quarters of those infected with TB in Malta are foreigners, including students, workers and refugees.
There is no fear that TB will spread among Maltese residents because apart from its lowprevalence, the disease iscontrolled, according to Charmaine Gauci, director of the Health Promotion and DiseasePrevention Directorate.
The local strategy will focus on increasing professional and public awareness, enhancing surveillance of people who hail from high TB endemic countries and hastening the clinical treatment process.
It will also strengthen directly observed treatment, where a nurse or other health professionals personally monitor the daily medicine intake.
Discovered 130 years ago, TB kills 200 people worldwide every day. Nearly nine million people worldwide were infected with TB in 2010. By the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the TB rate started increasing globally at an alarming rate.
The disease that attacks any part of the body
TB is a disease caused by bacteria which can attack any part of the body, but it mostly affects the lungs. Symptoms include prolonged cough, chest pain, weight loss and night sweats.
One has to be in direct close contact for hours with an infectious TB patient to get infected. Only 10 per cent of those infected develop TB.
People can find out they have been infected by taking a skin and a blood test for TB.
Inexpensive effective drugs help kill TB bacteria and avoid the risk of developing TB lateron in life. An average of seven TB cases per 100,000 people were reported in the past 10 years.
TB decreased significantly between 1995 and 2011 among the Maltese population but increased significantly among migrants in the past nine years.
TB cases are more frequent in the 15 to 44 age group. Sixteen per cent of the 19 TB/HIV co-infection cases, reported between 2007 and 2011, were Maltese.