Specific strategy needed to eliminate Tb in New Zealand

Ayesha Verrall.
Ayesha Verrall.
New Zealand has ''no room for complacency'' over tuberculosis risks, despite our success in largely eliminating the disease among pakeha, medical researcher Dr Ayesha Verrall says.

Dr Verrall, who is a University of Otago medical graduate, is urging New Zealand to become the first country to eliminate tuberculosis (Tb), the top infectious disease killer in the world.

''With the right leadership, we could be the first country to eliminate tuberculosis,'' she said.

''We need to act now, while the number of multi-drug resistant cases in New Zealand is low.''

This was an opportunity to ''eliminate Tb'', and we had already ''nearly achieved that for large parts of our community''.

New Zealand had endorsed the United Nations' sustainable development goal to eliminate tuberculosis by 2035, but it did not have a strategy to achieve this.

New Zealand had ''nearly eliminated'' tuberculosis in pakeha populations, and this showed that ''with commitment we could eliminate Tb as a threat to everyone else's health''.

The disease was preventable, but New Zealand had not reduced rates in recent years and there were about 300 cases each year.

Of particular concern were the cases of multi-drug resistant Tb, which often cost about $400,000 to treat.

Asked about links between poverty and Tb, Dr Verrall said our public health system needed to be properly resourced to tackle Tb in areas of rural poverty and transport problems, such as in the northeast North Island, near Gisborne.

Dr Verrall is an infectious diseases physician whose research focuses on Tb. She is a senior lecturer in the department of pathology and molecular medicine at Otago University's Wellington campus.

She was commenting on the eve of a major international conference on tuberculosis, which starts in Wellington tomorrow.

Australia had a tuberculosis elimination strategy, but New Zealand had only had ''an elimination strategy for bovine [cow] Tb''.

Asked if New Zealand was being left behind by other nations over Tb, she said the United Kingdom and the United States already had elimination strategies in place, and were using more modern and effective screening methods.

New Zealand used old-fashioned screening methods, particularly in immigration, that ''fail to detect all forms of tuberculosis'', she said.

Comments

Clearly the New Zealand strategy should be to 1080 all high risk population areas. After all it's worked so well with bovine TB!?!

 

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