Like other parts of the globe, World Tuberculosis (TB) Day will also be observed in Pakistan on March 24 to create awareness about the global epidemic and making efforts to eliminate the disease.
Various activities have been planned to mark the day by medical and educational institutions besides governmental and non-government organizations. One-third of the world’s population is currently infected with TB. The Stop TB Partnership, a network of organizations and countries fighting TB, organizes the day to highlight the scope of the disease and to prevent and cure it. World TB Day is designed to build public awareness that tuberculosis today remains an epidemic in much of the world, causing the deaths of several million people each year, mostly in developing countries. It commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch astounded the scientific community by announcing that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis, the TB bacillus.
At the time of Koch’s announcement in Berlin, TB was raging through Europe and the Americas, causing the death of one out of every seven people. Koch’s discovery opened the way towards diagnosing and curing TB. World Health Organization (WHO) has developed a new six point Stop TB strategy which builds on the successes of DOTS while also explicitly addressing the key challenges facing TB. Its goal is to dramatically reduce the global burden of tuberculosis by 2015 by ensuring all TB patients, including those co-infected with HIV and those with drug-resistant TB, benefit from universal access to high-quality diagnosis and patient-centered treatment.
The strategy also supports the development of new and effective tools to prevent, detect and treat TB. The Stop TB Strategy underpins the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015. Dr Sharif Astori from Federal Government Poly Clinic (FGPC) said that TB is an infectious bacterial disease caused by mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs. He added the disease is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the throat and lungs of people with the active respiratory disease. He said in healthy people, infection with mycobacterium tuberculosis often causes no symptoms, since the person’s immune system acts to wall off the bacteria. He said the symptoms of active TB of the lung are coughing, sometimes with sputum or blood, chest pains, weakness, weight loss, fever and night sweats.
World TB day to be observed on 24th
