SADC secretariat casts weight on fight against tuberculosis

AS the World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics on Tuberculosis (TB) are still alarming in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the SADC Secretariat has called for interventions by the member states to address the challenges.

The data unveiled by WHO in 2021, showed 52 per cent of all TB notifications in African region (AFRO) are from the SADC countries.

Speaking on Monday during launching of the Regional TB Dashboard and Repository held in Dar es Salaam, the Senior Programme Officer – Health and Nutrition, SADC Secretariat, Dr Willy Amisi, said considering the burden of TB in the SADC region member states have to double efforts in addressing the TB challenges.

The launched database was constructed by the East, Central, and Southern Africa Health Community (ECSA-HC) in collaboration with SADC through its programme ‘TB in the Mining Sector (TIMS)’, which is intended to store statistics on the trend of TB in mines among 16 SADC member states.

“We have to step up our efforts to address frightening statistics of TB in our region and the launched SADC regional data depository dashboard will help us centralise the regional TB data in one server, something that will ease the movement to address the woe”, SADC Secretariat, Dr Amisi told the media.

In particular, Dr Amisi emphasised that the database will ease the challenge of accessing TB information for regional policy-making about the disease.

Expounding on why SADC Secretariat focuses on mines, Dr Amisi said people working in mines are more at risk of contracting the disease, since the mining areas are associated with exposure to dust.

“Why is there so much TB in mines? The mining areas are associated with exposure to dust; the silica dust particles become trapped in lung tissue, causing inflammation and scarring,” he added.

Director of Operations and Institutional Development for ECSA-HC, Mr Sibusiso Sibandze said “This Dashboard is very important because as you know data or information is power…we want to make sure that we can measure how we are moving towards realizing the regional target as far as TB treatment is concerned”.

Shedding the light on how they report to WHO about the disease, the Senior Programme Officer for TB and Communicable Diseases from the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), Dr Charles Sandy, said member states have been reporting annually to the SADC Secretariat manually, adding that member states reporting was characterised by delays and incompleteness.

System Analyst from University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Ms Merina Luambano, said the Dashboard will improve data collection, reporting and processing for TB and other occupational lung diseases, adding that the launched web-based system is users friendly.

SADC Secretariat with the support of ECSA-HC secured external Technical Assistance from the University of Dar es Salaam to assist with developing a fully functional regional data repository for TB, TB/HIV and other occupational lung diseases data.