Afghanistan: Officials Report Decrease in TB Fatalities
March 22, 2009
The number of people who die from tuberculosis in Afghanistan has declined by 50% over the past few months, according to the director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) TB Control Program in Afghanistan, Syed Karam Shah.
International media quoted Mr. Shah as saying this decrease has led to 10,000 prevented deaths annually. This is in sharp contrast to previous years, when an estimated 20,000 people used to die from TB annually, according to the 2007 Afghanistan Human Development Report. The WHO’s TB prevention and treatment services now reach 80% of the people living in Afghanistan today.
Dr. Asadullah Fazli, the director of the Health Department in the Kunar Province - formerly one of the most high-burden areas in the country - attributed the decrease to increased prevention education and a successful public awareness campaign about the disease and its treatment in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Dr. Fazli emphasized that educational institutions and teachers have played a critical role in fighting the disease and reducing stigma of TB patients.
In addition to targeted educational activities, provisions of food support to TB patients and their families have a direct relation to the patient’s quick recovery and healthy reintegration into society. The United Nations World Food Programme has led the effort to make sure TB patients receive the food they need to regain their health. According to Afghan National Institute for Tuberculosis Specialist Yunus Ghanizada, the WFP provides patients with acute food support needs with wheat, cooking oil, and other important staples.
The international recession and global food crisis has put the success against the TB epidemic in Afghanistan at risk. As CAHR reported in August, harvests of non-irrigated wheat, the food staple in Afghanistan, dropped by 80% and prices for bread, wheat, and rice rose by 300% in 2008 – leaving the country even more dependent on international aid. Although it is unclear what cuts will be made, developed countries are considering allocating more resources to their domestic budgets to compensate for losses caused by the financial meltdown. During his televised vice presidential debate last fall, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said that foreign aid might have to be reexamined as the US looks for ways to decrease spending.
International development experts are fighting to maintain the current level of funding spent on aid. In an interview with the UN News Service, UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura stated the international community “cannot allow rich countries to use this crisis as an excuse to turn their backs on the world’s poor.” In a conference in Olso last October, UN humanitarian aid chief John Holmes pleaded with donors to resist pressure to cut their desperately needed funding. “Our very strong plea is: ‘please, try to insulate your development budgets from those pressures’….Whatever the (financial) pressures might be…developed countries should make that these aid budgets are maintained, and if possible, increased,” the Agence France Presse quoted him as saying.