LAHORE, June 17: Dr Amir Nazir, the Government Model Chest Clinic, Ganga Ram Hospital, incharge, called on Monday for a massive awareness campaign about tuberculosis to eliminate the disease.

Addressing a news conference at the Lahore Press Club, Dr Nazir said the WHO statistics revealed that there were around 10.2 billion TB patients in the world till the year 2000. He said the number of patients were increasing very rapidly. He also said that about 3.5 million TB patients died every year.

He said there were about three million TB patients in Pakistan which was ranked fifth in the world in this regard. He claimed that 300,000 patients were added every year to the already very high number.

Dr Nazir regretted that only one out of five patients was diagnosed correctly and the ratio of proper treatment and success rate was only 20 per cent. “A patient, who does not get proper treatment infects about 15 healthy persons in a year,” he said. As such, he said, TB was not an individual problem but a social problem.

He said TB was a totally curable disease if a patient was diagnosed properly and regularly took the prescribed medicines for a certain period. He said spurious medicines and wrong prescriptions led the patients towards resistant TB.

Dr Nazir said the Health Department had recently started the directly observed therapy system to ensure regular medication for eight months. He said the DOTS was currently being practised in five districts. It would be extended to 13 districts by next year.

Dr Nazir said the government should include the subject in the MBBS syllabus. He said the government should also ask the citizens to report TB patients to the Health Department.

He demanded that the government should appoint TB specialists at district and tehsil levels. It should also ban the sale of TB drugs without prescription by a recognized doctor.

He said the government should also ban tobacco advertisements and launch an awareness campaign in print and electronic media.