Jakarta, IO – According to the 2022 Global TBC Report, Indonesia has the second highest number of TBC sufferers worldwide, after India. Next in line are China, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2020, Indonesia was the third most tuberculotic country in the world. In other words, there has been a degradation in our health levels in 2021. The estimated number of cases was 969,000 (one person infected by the disease every 33 seconds), increasing 17% from the 824,000 cases recorded in 2020. The incidence level is 354 per 100,000 citizens, with a mortality rate of 55 per 100,000 sufferers.
“Referring to the Presidential Regulation Number 67 of 2021 concerning the Mitigation of Tuberculosis, the Global End TBC Strategy target by 2030 is decreasing TBC incidence by 80% to 65 cases per 100,000 citizens, and mortality decreasing to 6 per 100,000 sufferers. The biggest obstacles in the discovery of cases are the strength of the stigma, the unavailability of medication, and delayed therapy. I know it’s cliché, but everybody should cooperate to ensure that TBC elimination gets accelerated,” declared dr. Tiffany Tiara Pakasi, MA, Head of the Ministry of Health’s TBC Task Force, in the “Outlook TBC 2023 towards the Elimination of TBC in Indonesia in Seven Years: through the Perspectives of Community, Economic, Socio-Political, and Climate Change Systems” held on Wednesday (11/01/2023).
Data on TBC notifications throughout 2022 shows that out of the 969,000 extant cases, the discovery rate is 72%, or 697,448 notified cases, lower than the target reportage rate of 90%. Of this total, only 585,473 cases were treated. “I suppose we should be grateful, as the reportage rate is increased from a mere 46% in 2021, with only 403,168 patients receiving treatment that year. In 2020, only 48% of TBC cases were reported, and only 362,418 were treated; a whopping reportage rate of 67% in 2019 with 568,987 cases getting treated. The Covid-19 pandemic was a major reason why we discovered and diagnosed so few cases in recent years. The Ministry of Health shifted its focus to Covid, lowering its concern towards both TBC in productive adults as well as in children and teens. Diagnosing TBC in children is hard, because it does not use sputum testing, but scoring instead. Therefore, parents must be extra wary for symptoms of TBC among their children, especially if there are adult sufferers of the disease in the house,” dr. Tiffany said.