World Tuberculosis Day 2016- Working Together To Eliminate TB

On the 24th of March, 2016 World Tuberculosis Day was celebrated around the world and I was opportune to participate in the T.B awareness campaign held in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The Rivers State Ministry of Health in conjunction with Civil Society for The Eradication of Tuberculosis in Nigeria (Rivers State Chapter) and JCI Port Harcourt Metro held several programmes which kicked off from Monday and ended today with an awareness rally to mark World TB Day in Port Harcourt.

World Tuberculosis Day is celebrated every year by the people all across the world at international level on 24th of March. It is celebrated to raise the common public awareness about the epidemic disease of tuberculosis as well as get their efforts in order to totally eradicate this disease. As around 1.7 million of the people are dying of this disease every year. 24th of March has been established to commemorate the tuberculosis day by all at one place in order to get some solution to eradicate it from the world.

World TB Day is established as an annual event to be celebrated by the people to make them aware of the basic and essential knowledge of tuberculosis, causes, prevention and cure of this disease to get prevented and eradicate this disease from the world. It is very necessary to aware people of all group and field about this epidemic disease to take precautions. All the people at workplace or at home should be encouraged about their health maintenance and must know about the prevention from tuberculosis.

It is an airborne disease caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which generally affects the lungs) and can kill around 4000 people every day. It gets transmitted from the infected person to another weak person through the droplets formed in the throat or lungs. According to the report in 2005, it was noted that most infected people were from the south-east Asia (34% of the global case). 8.7 million new cases were raised whereas 1.4 million of the people were died of TB (64000 deaths of children) in the year 2011. Most of the death cases belong to the low and middle income group including poor communities and vulnerable groups.

People must know that it is a completely curable disease at very low-cost through the DOTS treatment administered by the government. Its treatments and diagnostic tests should be accessible by each and every person affected by the tuberculosis all over the world and death rate of this disease should be zero.

World TB Day celebration provides a big opportunity to all the people to be aware of the causes and precautions of TB. It mobilizes the political and social authorities for further progress towards the disease prevention for the effective reduction in the TB cases and death rate in the coming years. Since 1990, the mortality rate of TB has decreased by 40% all over the world. Invention of various new TB tools has occurred for rapid diagnostic tests of TB. All this have become possible only because of this awareness campaign.