Appolonia Adeyemi 
As part of strategies to effectively tackle tuberculosis (TB) in Nigeria with a view to curb new infections and preventable deaths, the Country Director for Health Policy Plus (HP+), Dr. Frances Ilika has advocated country ownership of TB control programmes in terms of investing adequate funding to fight the disease.
Ilika who made the call during a virtual TB Media Roundtable, which held this week, said in view of the negative impact that COVID-19 pandemic has on TB, it has become necessary to ditch the Nigeria’s dependence on donor funding for TB programmes so as to ensure better outcomes.
While reminding stakeholders about the impact of COVID-19 on other diseases including TB, Ilika said while the country focused on COVID-19, “we need to remember that we have other deadly diseases that have even been enabled further by COVID-19 epidemic. “Hence, domestic resource mobilisation is very key; we need to move away from dependence on donor funding for TB and we need to improve our budget allocation.”
Based on this advocacy, Ilika reasoned that a lot of effort was needed at the national level including from the parliamentarians and the executives to ensure that adequate funding was budgeted for TB control, to see to the timely release of the funds at both the national, state and local government levels.
TB is a contagious infection that usually attacks the lungs. It can spread to other parts of the body such as the brain and spine. A type of bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes the infection..
In addition, the , the Country Director for Health Policy Plus (HP+), said beyond improving funding for TB Nigeria should be thinking of different funding mechanisms for TB.
“We need to ensure spending at national and state levels. Make sure it’s spent efficiently and that it goes down to the facility and community levels where it’s needed the most.”
According to Ilika, it has become necessary to stimulate private sector investment as “COVID-19 has shown us that the private sector can contribute a lot to health spending; we need to leverage on that to actually get the private sector to get involved in TB control.”
Ilika said, “We need policies to integrate TB and COVID-19, adding, “as we are looking for COVID-19 cases we should also be looking for TB cases” for early detection and follow up treatment.’
Speaking on the impact of COVID-19 on TB, the National Coordinator of National TB and Leprosy Control Programme (NTBLCP), Dr. Adebola Lawanson revealed that the lack of access to health facilities during the lockdown led to TB patients developing Drug Resistant strains of TB.
“However on the long run what we see is that it is affecting them negatively with regard to the number of cases that were being identified as far as TB is concerned and again it was further deepening and lowering our TB case finding because of the fact that during that lockdown a lot of people were together in unsanitary environments and had to bond with a lot of their family members.”
Lawanson lamented, “There were also opportunities for increased TB case mortality and morbidity.”
