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Talent Gore
ZIMBABWE has taken major steps to address the existing gaps in the identification of Tuberculosis cases among children.
Health and Child Care AIDS and TB Unit acting director, Dr Fungai Kavenga, said despite gains made, childhood TB remains a burden as the country aims to meet the World Health Organisation recommendation.
“A lot of work still needs to be done on childhood TB and it remains a public health problem for the country,” he said.
“There were a number of challenges that we had and the first one is that our health care workers did not have the capacity to diagnose TB in children, limited tools and, of course, stigma and discrimination but right now we are doing a number of communication and advocacy campaigns to fight stigma.
“You know TB is curable in children and this is what we are sending out there so that parents and caregivers can bring forward children once they suspect that the child has TB.
“We are also training our health care workers so that they are up to speed with what has to be done as you may know TB is a little bit difficult to diagnose in children compared to adults.”
Dr Kavenga added:
“There are a number of initiatives that we can do as a country and one of them is engaging that private sector and already we are implementing the public private partnership (PPP) framework where we are engaging various private players to come on board and this alone can increase domestic resources,” he said.
“We now have a political commitment to end TB in Zimbabwe by 2030 and so this will come with increased resources from the fiscus.
“There were targets to eliminate TB in children set at the UN High Level Meeting so if you look at those targets children should contribute 10 percent of the notification target over that period from 2023 to 2027.
“Between 2022 and 2023, we have already started moving in the right direction, children contributed six percent in 2022, seven percent in 2023 and we hope we continue with that trajectory until we meet targets of 10 percent.”
Online Reporter