World T.B. Day spreads awareness
In other news, World Tuberculosis Day is being celebrated on Tuesday March twenty-fourth and Cleopatra White Health Clinic is leading the charge in spreading awareness about this infectious disease. The symptoms of TB include a persistent cough that won’t go away, headaches, fever, weight loss, poor appetite and a general feeling of tiredness. According to the family nurse practitioner at the Cleopatra White Polyclinic, they will use the week to educate the public and hopefully keep the number of reported cases low.
Louise Neal, Family Nurse Practitioner, Cleopatra White Health Clinic
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease which affects mostly the lungs but it can affect different parts of the body. The thing is, once you have it in the lungs, it is carried from one person to the other through droplet infection, meaning every time somebody coughs, sneeze, laugh; the little droplets that comes out of their mouth and goes into the air so anybody else can breathe it. If the person breathes it then they also can get T.B. but if they’re nice, strong and healthy, T.B. won’t affect them right now unless the body gets weak then it will affect them.
We are celebrating today right up until Friday. Today we are having different talks and we plan to visit one or two schools and tell them about tuberculosis. Tomorrow is the day set aside internationally for World T.B. Day. The theme is “I am stopping T.B.”. What we are doing, we want people to be aware of tuberculosis. We don’t have a whole lot of cases but we have enough for people to understand that it is here and we need to be conscious of that and do something about it. On Friday we’re going to do a workshop for health workers or staff and this would be staff from all over the country; all the districts. We’re going to have people coming from there to the workshop and the idea is to empower them with tools to fight against T.B.”
Nurse Neal says that there were eighty-six cases of TB reported in 2008 and there were sixty eight reported cases in 2007. Belize has never recorded more than one hundred cases of the infectious disease per year.
