Tuberculosis in the South-East Asia Region - The Regional Report 2008

This annual report on tuberculosis highlights the progress being made by national TB programmes in the South-East Asia Region, which are regularly detecting and successfully treating more TB cases. As a result, both the occurrence of new cases of TB and deaths due to TB continue to show a slow but steady decline. National TB programmes are increasingly reaching out to the private sector, teaching and tertiary care facilities to ensure that patients now accessing these sectors are also registered within the national programmes to achieve similar high cure rates. Diagnosis and treatment services for TB patients co-infected with HIV and those with multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) are also being expanded in several countries in the Region. WHO support focuses on the following broad areas: advocacy and planning, coordination and collaboration, technical support, capacity building, resource mobilization and operational research. A country profile for each Member country is also provided in this publication.