Success of the Control of Tuberculosis in Nigeria: a Review

ABSTRACT

Tuberculosis (TB) has emerged as the single leading cause of death from any single infectious agent and has continued to be a major public health problem all over the world. Of the over 14 million cases worldwide reported by World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2008; Nigeria ranked fifth in terms of incidence. Depending on the prevailing social factors such as socio-economic status of the people; malnutrition; crowded living conditions; incidence of HIV/AIDS; level of development of health infrastructures; quality of available control programmes; degree of drug resistance to anti-tuberculous agents; etc; prevalence; patterns of presentation; and outcomes of treatment from TB can vary from one country to another and from one region of a country to the other. Attempts to deal with the problems of the disease led to the development of Directly Observed Treatment Short Course (DOTS) by WHO in 1995; and more recently the Stop TB strategy in 2006. In Nigeria; the DOTS programme has been implemented in all States and local government areas in the country and 3;000 DOTS centres have been operating across the country since 2006. This article reviewed the available information on the success of the control of TB in Nigeria has observed a significant improvement in TB detection and treatment. However; neither the set target for the detection rate nor the cure rate have been achieved nationally as several challenges have militated against the effective implementation of the DOTS programme