On the issue of infection risk which the doctor said is different from notification, Dr Igbabul explained that based on the population of the state, which according to the last census was about 6.8 million, it is estimated that 219 out of every 100,000 persons stand a risk of being infected with TB this year.
“We are now at the fourth quarter of the year, and so far we are able to identify only 4,135 TB cases which are currently on treatment, so if you want to estimate the risk of infection in the population, it is estimated that 1 untreated TB case is capable of infecting10 to 15 persons,” he said.
According Ishember, who is also the deputy director, public health, in the Ministry of Health and Human Services, “If you do a rough arithmetic and multiply 4,135 by the lowest number which is 10, you will have 41,350 persons who are at a risk of being infected with TB by the few people we have identified so far.
” It is expected that, based on the state population it is expected that at the end of the year, we will have close to 15,000 TB patients for the year 2021.”
Ishember also lamented that “we have just finished the 3rd quarter of the year and we are now in the Fourth quarter and if at this particular time we are only able to identify only 28 per cent and we have just two months to end the year, then we can say the number of cases detected is far lower than what is estimated for our population.