Presenting at Union Conference

Raghu Dhital, Deputy Director

This year for the first time ever a group of BNMT staff and partners attended the biggest international TB conference. As the conference was focused on TB, which I have focused on for more than two decades, I felt profound happiness to attend presentations on the latest research findings and discussions about innovative practices in tackling TB and meet global leaders in the field.

The 50th Union conference on Lung Health with the theme “Ending the Emergency; Science, Leadership and Action”, was held in Hyderabad, India.  The happiest moment for me was presenting BNMT’s TB REACH Wave 5 project”, showing the strong contribution of contract tracing and the role of GeneXpert molecular test for active TB detection in 8 districts of Nepal, and answering questions from the audience. This was an excellent opportunity to reiterate the importance and potential of active case finding scale-up for a low-resource country like Nepal and build networks with international TB experts for future collaboration and learning.

Of the many innovative actions on active TB case detection, I learned about use of mobile vans in rural African communities to detect TB. Surprisingly, participants in this project received a bottle of beer as an incentive when providing a sputum sample for TB screening! I believe that a similar strategy with locally appropriate incentives, such as nutrition package instead of beer could be replicated in Nepal to increase case finding. By attending the conference sessions, I also learned about a large scale vaccine trial for TB in India, China, and Africa supported by WHO. I believe a successful vaccine would be the greatest breakthrough in the fight against TB. In addition, I was particularly overwhelmed by the speech of Ms. Nandita Venkatesan, a young Indian woman, who survived XDR TB. After she was cured, she led a national campaign to advocate for rights to effective and affordable treatment for the people affected with drug resistant TB. She exceptionally showed this commitment and solidarity through an Indian traditional dance, which showed her energy to gain good health and life again.

Through her, I got to know about thousands of TB survivors in India, who are continuously advocating and supporting the people with TB through awareness programs, advocacy campaigns, and community actions to reduce prevailing stigma in the communities. I was overwhelmed when I met three TB-survivors, who live in India but are originally from Nepal. I discussed with them, the humanitarian work they have been doing in the field. I realized that empowering the TB survivors is crucial in ending TB related psychosocial issues and stigma. Therefore we invited them to visit BNMT in Nepal and are exploring ways to support the development of TB advocacy in Nepal in the future, to bring power and dynamism to the movement.

Therefore, attending the Union conference inspired us with the various ways we could act to support the national END TB strategy goal in Nepal.