Tuberculosis has been there for over one hundred and forty years.
So many people try to find a way to eliminate tuberculosis,
but so far, we haven't been able to do it.
Every year, about 10 million people on Earth suffering from tuberculosis.
So why we cannot eliminate tuberculosis?
This is a big question that I want to answer.
We have around two hundred thousand TB patients a year.
Only 60 percent was diagnosed and 40 percent do not know
that they have the disease.
In the middle of 2019,
I was informed that I have tuberculosis.
I had to say that when I received that information.
I was not a doctor.
I feel like I was a patient.
The nurse was afraid of me because of my disease.
after I experienced the whole treatment
period, which lasts for six months.
I had a lot of thought
about how the patient would cope with the whole process.
I thought that I'm a doctor and
it's already difficult.
My name's Greg Fox.
I'm a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Sydney
and a research leader at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research.
I moved over to Vietnam in 2009 to undertake a Ph.D.
looking at tuberculosis transmission.
I moved across there really with very little knowledge
of Vietnamese culture and language and began working with our partners,
who became longstanding collaborators at the National Lung Hospital in Hanoi.
It was quite an overwhelming experience.
Thanks to the grace and the patience of my collaborators,
we're able to start up this study of TB screening.
We started a research project
in Kamahl Province, the most southern part of Vietnam.
And what interesting and very surprising for us is the TB prevalence
declined by 40 percent in the intervention.
Within three years only.
Which is a very remarkable achievement
because we haven't seen such a reduction in such a short period
in another setting. I found that we could reduce mortality
by around a half, which was a pretty remarkable effect.
We have seen many patients
in our program who really hide from us
whenever we go to their house and knock the door,
they disappear because they don't want to be seen as the TB patient.
Historically, one of the explanations for tuberculosis
was that there was some sort of weakness in the family,
and that would be a reason to conceal that from from your community.
People who live with TB
were seen as those who are sick, those who are poor
and those who can transfer
the the disease to the next generation.
So it's highly stigmatized disease in Vietnam.
And that can be quite counterproductive because it can prevent people
from coming forward for screening and mean that people might conceal
that they have TB and might not want to go and receive the full treatment.
COVID appeared in Vietnam,
first on the 23rd of January 2020.
I still remember that day that there was such a chaos
in our country. And we have gone through
four waves of the COVID outbreak in Vietnam.
And it's really difficult for us because we have to work with patients
who have respiratory symptoms, who are likely to have the COVID.
And in our work, we have to conduct several tests,
such as to ask patients to produce sputum
or to blow strongly to our machine,
which might spread the virus if they have COVID-19.
So it's very dangerous because of COVID
we have to stop our study activities and only maintain
the care and support for patients who were already on our program.
I think COVID has taught us how we can be much more ambitious
about efforts to combat tuberculosis. Within Vietnam
you've seen a very strong national approach to prevent COVID transmission.
In contrast, tuberculosis is largely accepted as a part of life
in order to stop TB for everybody
we need to be really proactive in trying to screen for and and treat TB.
One of the challenges is, though, that
that requires addressing this major problem, the stigma.
And in order to address the problem of stigma, it requires people
to see the disease not not as being something that they should be blamed for,
but something that they can be cured from, because we have effective treatments.
If we can take the same approach and the same proactive
effort with tuberculosis, then it may be possible
to bring down the rates of TB very rapidly.
I hope that if the country could do a massive screening and treatment
countrywide, then even in the next 20 years
maybe our new generation even do not know what tuberculosis is,
because we could be able to to eliminate the disease.