The Directorate General of Health Services is taking an all-out preparation to conduct the survey on the prevalence of tuberculosis across the country.
The country’s biggest ever national survey on tuberculosis will take place over next three months.
The epidemiologists and other experts will collect samples and examine one lakh people randomly from 120 cluster groups.
Different types of essential tests– Sputam, X-ray and Jean– will be doneto get the reliable national prevalence rate of the disease.
Mobile X-ray machine and other examination kits will be kepton standby to do the necessary tests.
The survey will be conducted through the guidelines of World Health Organisation, which is providing the technical assistance for Bangladesh.
Although the process to carry out the survey started in June 2013 the main activities like sample collection, examination and other field works would start inthe coming June.
It would take one year to complete the survey and the Directorate General of Health Services(DGHS) set the target to publish the final survey report by June 2015.
Prof Dr Mahmudur Rahman, director of the Institute of Epidemiology Disease Control and Research,told the Dhaka Tribune on Saturday at present there were four countries in the world – Bangladesh Korea and Nepal –yet to complete the survey on the prevalence of tuberculosis.
Of the four, Indonesia had been conducting the survey currently and Bangladesh was in the pipeline.
Mahmudur said a 10-member team would goto Indonesia for more than a week-long trip to learn how the surveyin the country was being carried out.
Md Ashek Hossain, line director of the National Tuberculosis Programme,told the Dhaka Tribune preparations for conducting the survey started last year, and currently they were working on the operational procedure.
The survey in the field level would start by June, he hoped.
It was learnt that there was no reliable statistics of tuberculosis patients in Bangladesh.
In 2007-2008, Bangladesh ran a national survey on the prevalence of tuberculosis among 52,000 people of 40 cluster groups.
The national tuberculosis survey was conducted between October 2007 and March 2009 which was a cross-sectional community-based multistagecluster survey.
The survey identified33 new sputum smear-positive pulmonary tuberculosis cases.
The mean ageof the detected patients was 47.2 year. The overall crude prevalence of newsmear-positive tuberculosis was 63.3 per 1,00,000.
Dr Asek Hossain, line director of the National Tuberculosis Programme, told the Dhaka Tribune the World Health Organisationdidn’t recognise the survey.
So they were going to conduct the national survey again, he mentioned.
