Agence France Presse

HEADLINE: Tuberculosis treatment in DR Congo well short of UN standards
DATE: March 25, 2003 Tuesday

DATELINE: Kinshasa, March 25

The rate of cure for people suffering from tuberculosis in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) falls short of the standards set by the UN World Health Organisation, a health specialist said Tuesday.

Etienne Bahati, director of the vast country's national anti-tuberculosis programme, said that according to the latest figures available, only 70 percent of 66,906 registered cases were cured in 2001. The UN health organisation has said that the cure rate worldwide for the infectious bacterial disease, which affects the lungs, should be at least 85 percent.

About 20 million people in the DRC, many of them women, are at risk from tuberculosis because of poor sanitary conditions, poverty and ignorance concerning preventive measures, Bahati said.

The treatment technique used in the country consists of drug therapy under direct medical surveillance in health centres for the first two months of an eight-month programme.

The WHO representative in the DRC, Henriette Wemba Nyama, said that for World TB Day, which was on Monday, the organisation had focussed on tuberculosis as part of UN programmes to fight HIV/AIDS, since "tuberculosis is one of the main opportunistic diseases in AIDS cases".