Trials and triumphs in TB fight

By ALPHONSE BARIASI
RETIRED banker Arthur Moi knows enough to tell what works and what does not work so well in the battle against the scourge of tuberculosis on public health.
It pains Moi to see children, young people and the elderly in our communities die of TB in this day and age, given the effectiveness of drugs and supposedly better public awareness and communication.
Moi, 69, of Uiaku Village in Tufi, Northern joined the Westpac Bank as a 20-year-old in 1970 and has worked in most parts of the country where the bank has branches.
He met and married his wife Mireka of Trobriand Islands in Milne Bay while they were both staff of the first bank of PNG.
They have both left employment and are living at Hohola in NCD, minding a number of grandchildren from adopted children.
After serving Westpac Bank, formerly Bank of New South Wales, for 28 years Moi retired but still had much stamina in him to simply idle around. He raised his hand to volunteer with the local parish of the United Church. The church saw his willingness and potential so he was sent to a counselling course in Sydney, Australia in 2003.
Upon his return he found that he was not so involved in any active work of counselling given his training so he went out looking for something to do. He had short stints with Lifeline, the National Aids Council and the PNG Bible Society.
But his best years of volunteer work were with the TB programme in the city.
“A young man in our church contracted TB and to they were looking for someone to supervise him in taking his medication under the Dots (directly observed treatment short-course (DOTS) programme, someone other than family members but within the neighbourhood.
“The youth came to me; actually Hope Worldwide who were running the TB programme then brought him to me and asked if I could volunteer to supervise him in his treatment,” Moi said.
“I agreed because I knew the young man. I was thinking that it was going to be a one-off thing but was surprised that along my street there were others with the disease.
“I suspected TB when people were coughing for long periods or rapidly losing weight so I inquired and urged them to go for medical checks. One thing led to another and not long there were a number of patients who had been confirmed to be suffering from TB and I had to supervise them all.”
It appeared to Moi that every other house had at least one family member suffering from TB.
His volunteer work was supported by the St Therese clinic at Hohola and as a counsellor he took patients home and ensured they got their daily dosages and also shared with them from the word of God.
Moi spent three whole years as a TB volunteer counsellor but after that the programme was changed slightly and the people he had worked with were no longer in charge.
“As a trained counsellor, I enjoyed what I was doing. I prayed with the patients and shared the word of God. After three years, the programme of volunteering in the city stopped.”
Moi says volunteering to supervise patients in neighbourhoods is a great way to ensure people complete they treatment and eventually TB can be kicked out.
“You know the nieghbourhood and people will not question or harass volunteers unlike when you go to completely new areas to assist.”
From his experience, Moi says most of his patients have been cured of TB but there were a couple of cases of defaulters and he knows of at least one death as a result of that.
A young man from Gulf didn’t inform Moi that he was going home over the Christmas holiday. He only knew of his going when a relative came from home and asked to take the patients drugs to him in the village. But that was the last he heard about the patient.
“Another young man on medication turned up one morning and told me that he was feeling a lot better and didn’t want to continue. Two months later his mother brought him in but by that time he was very ill. I don’t know what happened to him after that.”
In another case a patient was forced out of the family home and lived on an old car on the roadside. The family brought his personal belongings out of the house and left them in the old car which became his home.
“He was a sorry case. The family didn’t want him to live in the house but nobody wanted to take him to the hospital.”
Moi saw him sitting in the morning sun on the bonnet of the vehicle and asked the family and was told that he was ill but could not go to the hospital.
Moi arranged for him to go the hospital and ensured that he completed his TB treatment. Today that patient is a happy and healthy man.
In an urban setting where everyone needs to work to survive, TB can be devastating. Moi remembers a teacher who had just had a heart operation and that was followed by the death of her mother. To compound things further her marriage was unsteady, she contracted TB and was regularly missing work so was laid off work.
She turned up to Moi who helped her to “break down her many problems into manageable bits” and deal with each one by one.
In six months she was cured of TB, returned to her first husband and working again.
For Moi such are the joys and trials of working as a volunteer counsellor in the TB programme in NCD.
WHO says TB remains the world’s deadliest infectious killer. Each day, nearly 4,500 people lose their lives to TB and close to 30,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease. Global efforts to combat TB have saved an estimated 54 million lives since the year 2000 and reduced the TB mortality rate by 42 per cent.
Moi says TB is here to stay – in suburbs, settlements and villages – because of our lifestyle. It is passed on easily because of the way we live.
“One of the best ways to combat TB is the volunteer system where patients within a kilometer radius of each volunteer’s home are supervised to ensure they complete their treatments. Today’s treatment is better than the old regimen and patients should be encouraged to complete it.”
He commends global and national efforts and the allocation of resources to fighting TB but poses a caveat: “There is a lot of money to fight TB but it has to be spent in the right place for the best results.”