Challa Negeri Ruda
Director of Challenge TB Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Title: Recognizing Contact Investigation as a critical strategy to find more missed TB cases in Ethiopia
Biography
Biography: Challa Negeri Ruda
Abstract
According to WHO (2018), Ethiopia missed about one third of its estimated 180,540 TB patients in 2017. Targeted TB screening, of which Contact Investigation (CI) is one, is one of the priority strategies of finding missed TB in Ethiopia.
CI strategies have been included within the revised national TB guidelines and strategic documents; national SOPs and CI registers have been prepared; a two-days training has been provided to >800 health workers where a one-year-facility-based CI action plan was developed with 1,939 facilities currently implementing CI.In addition to CI at facility, at community level, using 2 Health Extension Workers(HEWs) per health post(over 35,000 HEWs in the country), outreach CI (during weekly house visits) is initiated for contacts identified at health facility.
Evidence of program implementation that CI is a high impact intervention for case detection.USAID /CTB has implemented prospective, reverse and retrospective CI approaches with a markedly observed increase in the detection of TB cases.