MANILA (August 28) — Starting today, Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) will start providing tuberculosis (TB) medications for 141 patients in Tondo, Manila. This is a support to the Manila Health Department (MHD), which has been struggling with drug shortages over the past year.
This will enable patients whose treatment has been pending for several months to start taking their medication. This will also help patients who started but were unable to complete their treatment because medication stocks were not enough for the completion of the treatment duration.
Since January 2024, over 300 patients have been diagnosed with TB through the active case-finding activities of Doctors Without Borders in Tondo, Manila. While some patients were able to start treatment, many others were unable to start treatment due to the unavailability of TB drugs.
In addition, a number of patients who started treatment were unable to continue the treatment until completion due to the shortages of drugs for the continuation phase. This is due to the recurrent drug shortage at the local health centers, and due to the patients’ economic difficulties in purchasing TB drugs themselves. Members of the community have refused to attend the screening activities at the active case-finding activities organized by Doctors Without Borders, fearing the impact of the drug shortage should they be diagnosed with TB.
In districts 1 and 2 of Tondo, Manila, Doctors Without Borders has been running an active case-finding activity for tuberculosis since 2022, in collaboration with MHD. This Doctors Without Borders project makes TB screening accessible and available near the areas where Tondo residents live and work. Doctors Without Borders teams provide free TB screening, trace household contact cases, and refer TB-positive patients to local health centers. They also follow up with patients to ensure they adhere to the treatment regimen and break the chains of transmission.
“Today, we are relieved we could support the Manila Health Department and health facilities in Tondo with a donation of 54,720 tablets TB drugs,” says Ghazali Babiker, Head of Mission for Doctors Without Borders in the Philippines. “Over 100 patients who have known about their TB positive status and who have been anxiously waiting for several months, will be able to receive much-needed treatment.
However, this is a temporary solution, which cannot become the norm as disruptions in TB drug procurement are preventable. With international efforts to eliminate TB ongoing globally, we need strong political commitment from heads of states and civil society to participate in this effort, including from the Philippines.”
Proper diagnosis and treatment, especially in line with updated recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO) are key to eliminating TB, but these cannot be achieved without the sufficient and timely supply of drugs. Doctors Without Borders strongly urges all stakeholders involved in TB care in the Philippines to find durable solutions to tackle the issue of drug shortage in the country.
The shortage is not limited to drugs for the treatment of TB. There is also a delay in the provision of preventive treatment, due to a shortage of the tuberculin skin test (TST), needed to test some children prior to initiating preventative treatment, and to the lack of child-friendly fixed dose dispersible tablets (FDC)–used for preventive treatment for children who are exposed to TB patients—which is currently not available in the country.
Tondo is one of the country’s most densely populated areas, with approximately 76,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. To date, Doctors Without Borders has screened 29,291 people and diagnosed 1,280 patients with TB. These findings translate to an average positivity rate of 4.3%, which is higher than the 3% national TB positivity rate in the Philippines.| – TB
