NEWS

WIRES

OTHER

Gender-Specific Home-Based Care for TB to Reduce Transport Cost and Time Loss

By Bobby Ramakant  

Although women get diagnosed for tuberculosis (TB) later than men, treatment outcomes among women are better than men with higher TB treatment success rate and lower default (drop-out) rate in the female patients. Among the unreached people who need TB care, a significant number of them are likely to be poor and probably women. There is a lot more we need to do to bring in the desired change in diagnosing people with TB as early as possible and treating them with standard regimens successfully.

"We need to integrate gender-specific home-based care for TB to reduce transport cost and time loss," said Mamta Jacob from Global Health Advocates (GHA) who was a keynote speaker at the recently held meet on TB and women in New Delhi, India, to mark the International Women's Day (8th March 2011).

"Partnering with traditional practitioners, establishing linkages with mental health programme for quality counselling, raising awareness among healthcare workers of atypical symptoms of TB in women are some of the initiatives we need to scale up to reach the unreached women with TB," said Mamta Jacob.

"Privacy in healthcare settings for women is also important. It is difficult for a woman to overcome social inhibitions and produce diagnostic quality sputum for TB test in a overcrowded and public setting like a public hospital for example. Also counselling is so crucial in TB control among women, especially family counselling, when a woman is the only TB patient in the family. This will go a long way to counter stigma and discrimination related to TB and also raise TB treatment literacy and infection control knowledge among family members," said Mamta Jacob.

Dr. Nerges Mistry, Director of the Foundation for Medical Research, Mumbai, India, was another keynote speaker who presented the content from the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) Module 7 which lists the role of ASHA workers in TB treatment phase. This was an eye-opener because one can only wish if this is implemented in letter and spirit to bring in a significant desired change we wish to see in TB control.

Malnutrition and food insecurity can exacerbate the risk of TB disease; other threats such as rising tobacco use and diabetes among women, can also mean an increasing burden of TB.

According to the fact-sheet on women and TB of the Stop TB Partnership, women can play a critical role in TB care and control as educators, organizers and providers. Hope the TB programmes will involve them furthermore as equal partners with dignity at all levels.

One clear action point for public health, gender and social justice stakeholders is to seriously and genuinely scale up possible collaborative activities between existing programmes addressing gender inequalities, reproductive and sexual health, maternal and child healthcare, and TB. (CNS)