By Prudence Ijah, Abuja.
In a bid to address the rising spread of Tuberculosis, the Global Fund und has reinstated her commitment to accelerate efforts towards the production of a vaccine for the leading infectious disease.
This was stated in a virtual meeting at the roundtable conference of the Board of the “Global Stop TB Partnership, with Ministers of Health and dignitaries from 11 African countries.
The Senior Disease Coordinator at the Global Fund, Dr. Eliud Wanerdwalo disclosed that the global fund is learning from the experience of COVID-19 vaccine and the speed with which a vaccine has been produced to address COVID-19 pandemic.
Wanerdwalo said “the development of a vaccine for tuberculosis has taken a very long time but learning from the experience of COVID-19, it is very important to hasten the time in the production of vaccines for TB”.
While speaking on the need to strengthen Tuberculosis response, TB case finding and treatment in Nigeria, the Global Fund in association with the African Union said that a grant of $143 Million has been approved for Nigeria to help respond and contain Tuberculosis (TB) for the next three years.
According to Global Fund, COVID-19 pandemic has caused a slowdown in other health issues hence efforts must be made to save millions of lives and provide access to essential TB care and prevention.
Wanerdwalo added that COVID-19 pandemic jeopardised global efforts to save millions of lives and provide access to essential TB care and prevention hence the expected rise in TB cases.
He pointed out that “Globally, these disruptions could result in an additional 6.3 million people developing tuberculosis and 1.4 million additional deaths resulting from TB between 2020 and 2025,”
“11 countries in Africa are expected to benefit from this grant and they include Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.”
Dr. Eliud Wanerdwalo, also hinted that “In the next three years, we will be investing about $12.7 million around the world, in low and middle income countries to support HIV tuberculosis and malaria in the 11 countries. We leverage countries which we had presented today, and Nigeria will receive $143M for Tuberculosis for the next 3 years,”
He stated that “In this session, we are collectively investing about 500 million US dollars over the next three years to fight Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV this present about 45% of our investment. So you can see how important these regions are to the Global fund,”.
Wanerdwalo added that for TB, Global Fund will be reinvesting almost half a billion US dollars over the next three years to scale up programs in these 11 countries, but in addition to this, we will be providing about 70 million US dollar to support countries, scaling up their programs to find people who are missing from TB treatment.
Suvanand Sahu, a deputy executive director Stop TB Partnership Secretariat, Geneva , said the areas of investment is to improve the access in diagnosis and purchase of more diagnostic equipment and visit disease and also to improve access to data. He explained that a number of countries were lagging behind in meeting the target of 2018 and 2022 set by the United Nations High Level Meeting, UNHLM.
The Deputy executive director said that they are investing in communities to be able to undertake screening and diagnosing using community health care workers.
In his words he said, “the drop in treatment of people made many people to remain untreated, TB is a leading infectious disease hence the need to accelerate TB case finding and TB response in the communities”.
“We know that close to over 60 percent of health Care seekers in Nigeria is through the private sector. There will be a significant investment in improving the network of private health sector in Nigeria”.
Sahu added that discussions at the roundtable meeting involving the 11 African countries with high burden TB, also included designing strategies to eliminate or mitigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on TB elimination programmes and services to TB patients.
Earlier, the first lady Aisha Buhari who is also the global TB Champion and Ambassador cautioned against global spike of tuberculosis incidence and deaths in 2021.
She expressed concern that efforts at ending the preventable and curable disease like TB were now complicated as a result of COVID-19.
The first lady said that ‘’the global TB incidence and deaths in 2021 would increase to levels last seen in between 2013 and 2016 respectively – implying a setback of at least 5 to 8 years in the fight against TB, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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