From Nigeria to Pakistan, TB testing ‘in a coma’ after US aid cuts

#Nigeria #Pakistan #testing #coma #aid #cuts

Lagos/Johannesburg/Manila: At a tense meeting in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, health workers considered the record of drug entries and records testing whether US aid deduction would expose years of tuberculosis in Africa’s most affected countries.

For several days in May, he caused a brain storm for the TB Local Network (TB Loan) to stop the elimination of US funding, which provides screening, diagnosis and treatment.

At the Abuja meeting, Ibrahim Aurov, coordinator of the African TB Coalition Civil Society Network, said, “You will have to identify the issues to deal with the spread of TB and it is in a coma due to a relief deduction.” “This means that more matters will be missed and destruction is spreading.”

This disappointing struggle to protect dangerous programs is being transmitted from the Philippines to South Africa because experts have warned that US aid eliminates the risk of recovering a deadly infectious disease that kills one million people every year.

The US Agency’s gutting for President Donald Trump’s international development has conducted TB testing and tracing in Pakistan and Nigeria, significant research has been halted in South Africa and TB survivors lack support in India.

The World Health Organization says “tough and sudden deductions in global health support” are at risk of changing the benefits of global efforts to fight the disease – 79 million lives have been saved since 2000.

In Nigeria, TB Loan is in the firing line. The project was established in 2020, during Trump’s first term, and received $ 45 million worth of financial support from USAID. The US Development Agency said it was committed to “TB Free Nigeria”.

According to a TB Loan official, five years later and with the same president, with the president, but now with more radical “US First” agenda, USAID’s support for TB Lone’s community testing work was abolished in February. Officers did not want to nominate because they did not have the power to speak on behalf of the project.

TB killed 268 Nigeria every day and historically reported to increase the risk of transmission. According to the World Health Organization, if a matter has been missed, the person can transfer TB to 15 people in a year.

The Thomson Writers Foundation spoke to half a dozen health workers who collect TB test samples for TB Loan, but stopped doing so in January due to freeze of US aid.

Between 2020-2024, TB Lone screened nearly 20 million people in the southwestern states in Nigeria, and consequently more than 100,000 patients were treated.

“If we do not work quickly, all this labor is in danger,” he said, adding that non -profit people working with TB loan have left more than a thousand contract workers who used to screen TB.

The Nigerian Ministry of Health did not respond to a request to comment on the impact of USAID deductions on TB programs.

In March, First Lady Oloremi Tanobo announced TB as a national emergency and donated 1 billion Naira ($ 630,680) to end the disease by 2030.

According to a statement sent to the Thomson Writers Foundation, in South Africa, Medical Charity Medicine Sons Frontiers (MSF) said that TB and HIV programs have been interrupted across the country, making patients tracking and examining, according to a statement to Thomson Writers.

The statistics show that in South Africa, in 2023, every 100,000 people had a TB rate of 427 people.

Health Minister Aaron Motsolady said in May that the government would launch a closing TB campaign for the screening and examination of 5 million people, and they also wanted new donor funding.

Referring to the efforts to deal with TB and HIV at the moment, he said, “In any case we will not allow this major work to be done in more than a decade.

South Africa is also a hub of research on both TB and HIV, and health experts say the reduction in funding is at risk of removing this important task.

In Pakistan, which sees 510,000 TB infection every year, MSF said that US deductions have interrupted TB screening in communities and other services in the southeastern province of Sandh. “We are worried that US funding shortages have affected community -based services, which will have an influential impact on children, which will cause more and more deaths,” said EI Hannan Few, MSF’s Medical Coordinator, said. “We can’t afford to spend funds on children’s lives.”