21 August 2010 - With her face covered by a burka, 18-year-old Shukria walks every day to the Herat provincial Tuberculosis (TB) centre to take four different medicines in front of a health care worker.

“We have no other way to make sure the patients take their medicine properly. If they are not strict in the beginning, their body may become multi-drug resistant and we cannot heal them,” said Dr Barakzai, provincial TB coordinator.

The process of watching a patient and introducing him or her to take the medicines correctly every day is part of the Direct Treatment Short Course (DOTS) strategy which has been incorporated by the Ministry of Public Health into its National TB Control Programme.

Within two months, Shukria, as other patients like her, will be given a bi-monthly supply of the pills to take home.

The Herat TB centre received 282 visitors last month alone, out of whom 27 were diagnosed as positive for TB. More than 39,000 new cases of TB are diagnosed each year in Afghanistan. About 70 per cent of those are women, according to the Ministry of Public Health.

The centre, one of more than 1,000 similar services across the country, is run by a small team of dedicated doctors with support from the UN World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), an international non-governmental organization (INGO).

WHO has solicited the support of the Italian Cooperation to build a larger centre which will soon be operational and allow for more room than the current small building on the compound of the provincial hospital.

While praising the new construction, Dr Barakzai warned that the commitment of the international community needs to increase to match the humanitarian needs in the area.
The comments come just days after the UN honoured its staff and all humanitarian workers on International Humanitarian Day on 19 August.

Cutting the rate of TB around the world is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which world leaders agreed to try to reach by 2015. Next month, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will convene a high level meeting in New York with world leaders to try to accelerate the progress towards the MDGs. President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to participate.

By UNAMA/Fraidoon Poya & Henri Burgard