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Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-10% of TB patients in the country are dying while the proportion of those dying whilst on treatment stands at an alarming 27% despite significant improvements in the scaling up of treatment services.

This has seen Zimbabwe remaining in the 30 top TB high burden categories in the world.

Speaking at a TB seminar in Harare Deputy Director HIV/AIDS and TB programme in the Ministry of Health Dr Charles Sandy said the country has scaled up its interventions but the more still needed to be done.

“Over the last 8 years we have been scaling up on laboratory services and creating microscopic centers.”

“X-ray diagnosis is going to be an important in the future as we are also changing the way of doing it. The old X-ray used films, we called that analogue but the new ones use computers and are digital”.

“Currently we have 16 digital machines and their main advantage is that they are cheaper since most TB patients are poor people”, he said.

“We still have a long way to go in terms of addressing TB especially in the rural areas though the prevalence rates in urban against rural isn’t much different”.

According to literature on the spread of TB, the disease is now spread more prevalently amongst the high risk populations such as prostitutes and HIV patients.

They are also calls to address at community level the high levels of stigma which are supposedly leading to lot of delays in getting treatment while lack of presumptive diagnosis by health care workers due to low index of suspicion has led to increased fatalities.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) 70% of Zimbabwe’s HIV patients also suffer from TB.

Globally the proportion of TB cases living with HIV was highest in the WHO African Region (31%), and exceeded 50% in parts of southern Africa.

In addition to accelerating the annual decline in TB incidence, reaching the 2020 milestone for a 35% reduction in TB deaths requires reducing the global proportion of people with TB who die from the disease (the case fatality ratio or CFR) from 17% in 2015 to 10% by 2020.

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