Participants at a one day training of general healthcare workers on Tuberculosis(TB) case contact investigation and management held in Benin City, the Edo State capital, have benefitted a lot and also have much to pass on to others in due course.
The programme, the first of its type in Edo State, which attracted participants from across the 18 local government areas of the state, is the brainchild of the state Ministry of Health.
According to Dr. Valentine Otoide, the Director of Policy, Planning, Research and Statistics of the Ministry, who stood in for the Commissioner for Health, Dr. Samuel Alli, “the workshop was all about training the TB focal persons and their contact tracers at the various local government areas on how to follow up contact tracing for an index case of TB that they pick up at the local government level.
“The training was necessitated because the rate of pick up of contact tracing is relatively low per index cases when TB is picked up. So, we decided that the best way to do it was to train the TB focal persons and their contact tracers on how best to follow up an index case of TB and trace all necessary contact and apply proper and best management practices in their locality.”
He expressed profound appreciation to the participants for their positive response to the programme which he described as one of a series to come up in the state soon.
Dr. Igbinedion Osagie, a state TB Control Programme Manager, alluded to the fact that TB is a big problem all over the world while stating that there are 420,000 cases of TB that occur in Nigeria every year.
“Unfortunately, we are not able to find and place all these TB cases on treatment. We started thinking what is the way that we can use to improve our reporting of TB cases. We thought that one of the ways to do it is by looking at people who are in close contact with TB cases and screening them for TB.
“If they have TB we place them on treatment. But if they don’t have TB we have medicines that they can take and it would prevent them from developing for the next two years.
“In the light of this information, the government of Edo State now thought it wise to train general healthcare workers to be able to screen contacts of TB cases. To either look out for TB cases among these their contacts or those contacts who do not have TB cases after the screening are able to be placed on some medicines. We call them TB preventive medicines.”
Dr. Akpodiete Alexander, a Programme Manager for TB and Leprosy Control for Delta State applauded the participants, saying: “from their responses they show that they’re manageable and they know what they’re doing. But information needs to keep coming for them to keep remembering the things that they’re supposed to do.”
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