Tag: tuberculosis

Health Ministry conducts “routine” TB screening at Maafushi prison after inmate diagnosed

The Ministry of Health today confirmed it has conducted a routine tuberculosis (TB) screening of staff and inmates at Maafushi prison after a single case of the disease was diagnosed at the facility.

Health Minister Dr Ahmed Jamsheed Mohamed today told Minivan News that a screening for TB had been undertaken at the prison, but added that just a single inmate had tested positive and been diagnosed with the disease.

The screening comes a month after the country’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) warned that a drug resistant strain of TB had been found in the Maldives, posing a “quite a serious” health threat for authorities to deal with.

However, Dr Jamsheed said today that there was no information at present to suggest the single case of TB detected at Maafushi Prison was a drug resistant form of the disease.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), TB is an infectious bacterial disease that can be transmitted via droplets in the throat and lungs of an infected person.

Despite praising authorities for their efforts to eradicate the disease across the Maldives in recent years, the WHO has expressed concern that drug-resistant strains of TB have become a major public health problem resulting from patients not fully completing the recommended six-month course of treatment.

New challenges

The Ministry of Health released a report earlier this year concluding that authorities in the Maldives were facing new challenges controlling the disease.

HPA Public Health Program Officer Shina Ahmed told Minivan News shortly after the report’s publication in March 2013 that although the new strain of TB was “quite serious”, thus far cases of the disease in the Maldives were not resistant to every drug available to patients.

“We have had a few cases come in now with the new strain. The most important thing we have to do is to continue and complete the course of treatment,” Shina said at the time.

“Most of these drug-resistant strains are caused by patients stopping the treatment. We have enough drug supplies to give to them, but because the course goes on for six months, patients tend to go off taking the treatment towards the end.”

In April 2012, staff at the Maldives Criminal Court were screened by health authorities for TB after an employee was found to have tested positive for the disease.

Control programs

International health authorities have previously observed that the Maldives had achieved notable success in TB control since the establishment of a national control program by the Department of Public Health in 1976.

Maldives has an estimated incidence of 47 per 100,000 population of all forms of TB and has sustained meeting the global targets for TB control since 1996, according to the WHO’s communicable disease department for South East Asia.

Tuberculosis, which had a prevalence in the Maldives of 35 cases per thousand people in 1974, declined to about 0.66 per 1000 by 1996, according to the findings.

However, last year the Health Ministry raised concerns over the growing number of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) cases in the Maldives.

The rate of TB prevalence among the country’s expatriate population is also reportedly on the rise as well.  “A large migrant workforce from high TB-burden countries,” continues to identified by the WHO as major challenge for local health bodies.

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New drug-resistant strain of TB found in Maldives “quite serious”: HPA

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) has warned that a new drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis (TB) that has appeared in the Maldives poses “quite a serious threat” to people’s health.

The agency’s comments follow a report released by the Ministry of Health on Sunday (March 24), revealing that it faces new challenges in order to control the disease in the Maldives.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), TB is an infectious bacterial disease that can be transmitted via droplets in the throat and lungs of the infected.

WHO states that drug-resistant strains of TB have become a major public health problem that has resulted from patients not fully completing the recommended six-month course of treatment.

HPA Public Health Program Officer Shina Ahmed told Minivan News today (March 25) that although the new strain of TB is “quite serious”, the particular strain found in the Maldives is not resistant to every drug available to patients.

“We have had a few cases come in now with the new strain. The most important thing we have to do is to continue and complete the course of treatment.

“Most of these drug-resistant strains are caused by patients stopping the treatment. We have enough drug supplies to give to them, but because the course goes on for six months, patients tend to go off taking the treatment towards the end,” Shina said.

Local media reported that the Health Ministry had revealed that 10,563 people had been registered to receive treatment for TB since 1963, out of which 5,256 people were said to have infected lungs.

Shina claimed that the majority of cases within the Maldives have been reported on the islands as opposed to Male’, and that in order to prevent the spread of the disease the HPA will be undertaking awareness programs.

An official from Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH) in Male’ stated that there was no need for the public to be concerned in regard to the spread of the disease, adding that there may have been only “one or two” cases found to have contracted the new strain.

“When we find a patient who is not responding to the prescribed course of treatment, there is always a second course they can take instead,” the official told Minivan News.

According to WHO, healthy individuals infected with TB are not often affected by any symptoms as the person’s immune system acts to “wall off” the bacteria.

The organisation states that symptoms of active TB are coughing, sometimes with blood, chest pains, weakness, weight loss, fever and night sweats.

The WHO Representative to the Maldives, Dr Akjemal Magtymova, Health Minister Dr Ahmed Jamsheed Mohamed and the Health Ministry were not responding to calls at time of press.

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Criminal court employees screened amid tuberculosis scare

Public health workers screened Criminal Court staff for tuberculosis (TB) and conducted awareness sessions about the disease on Thursday after an employee tested positive for the infectious disease.

A court employee told Minivan News today that staff were relieved health officials were now working to put a stop to the potential spread of tuberculosis at the court.  However, the member of staff said their colleagues were  “seriously concerned after one employee was tested positive”.

The employee speculated that the disease may have been transmitted to the court employee from a TB patient, who was brought to the court two months ago for a police custody extension.

Local media has reported that three court employees are thought to have tested positive for the disease so far.  These reports were today dismissed by court workers.

The staff member observed that the local media had picked up on the TB case because of the awareness session being held at the court today, while claiming that reports of multiple confirmed cases was misleading.

“It was just one confirmed but everyone was very scared.  All the employees have been screened now and nobody else was tested positive. But since there was widespread scare, doctors came to the court today and gave us information on TB,” the employee noted on condition of anonymity. “There was some concerns but everything is normal at the court now,” he added.

The potentially serious disease spreads from person-to-person through the air, for example, if someone coughs or sneezes.  It primarily attacks the lungs.

Despite, the TB scare at the Criminal Court, the Maldives has achieved notable success in TB control since the establishment of a National TB control programme (NTP) by the Department of Public Health in 1976. Maldives has an estimated incidence of 47 per 100,000 population of all forms of TB and has sustained the global targets for TB control since 1996, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO’s) communicable disease department for South East Asia.

Tuberculosis, which had a prevalence in the Maldives of 35 cases per thousand people in 1974, had declined in 1996 to about 0.66 per 1000. Childhood TB (under 5 years) is almost nil for the past three years due to the high rate of BCG vaccination, the report added.

The WHO also observed that upon adopting the recommended Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS)  in 1997, the TB patients in the Maldives continues to receive effective treatment.

However, the Health Ministry has recently raised concerns over a growing number of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Maldives. The rate of TB prevalence among the country’s  expatriate population is also reportedly on the rise as well.

“Large migrant workforce from high TB-burden countries,” is identified by the WHO as major challenge for local health bodies. However, the WHO has claimed that “MDR-TB and TB-HIV are not major problems in Maldives.”

Meanwhile, a growing diagnoses of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and treatment sites are being established in the region. In 2010, almost 4000 MDR-TB patients were put on treatment.  There are currently 105,000 MDR-TB cases estimated of affecting the region.  These figures were taken from the WHO annual report on tuberculosis titled “Tuberculosis Control in the South-East Asia Region 2012”.

The South-East Asia Region registered an estimated five million prevalent, and about 3.5 million incident TB cases in 2010.  Though the death rates in the region have declined due to successful implementation of the DOTS (directly observed treatment, short course), the disease still claims about half a million lives a year in the Region, the report read.

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