PNG lacks facilities to screen TB patients

 PAPUA New Guinea lacks facilities to test and prove in a timely manner whether people have multi-drug-resistant Tuberculosis (TB), an expatriate medical practitioner says.

Dr Tim Fletcher from the New Zealand Volunteers Services Abroad, who has been working at the Vunapope Hospital, in East New Britain, for the past two years, especially with the TB programmes, highlighted this last Friday when presenting “Tuberculosis and Why Australia is scared of PNG”.

Fletcher said ENB and PNG as a whole have the facilities to send samples to Port Moresby, then on to Brisbane but it was a difficult process and was slow and costly.

“We have come across people that have gone through the standard category one and two lines of drugs and have died but never had the chance to test them if they had multi-drug-resistant TB or not. So they were receiving treatment and got worse so we can only presume they had drug-resistant TB.”

Fletcher said they had observed patients with recurrent TB every six months but they had not proven drug-resistant TB.

He said Australia did have a problem with people with the potential for a lot of drug-resistant TB going into the country.

“Treating multi-drug-resistant TB is very expensive which is why Australia is fearful. They do not get drug-resistant TB,” Fletcher said.

At the same time, Dr George Pariwa from the Nonga Hospital said the only way to prove the TB was through sputum culture and using the gene expert machine which only detected resistant strand or bacteria but the device was not found in the country.