DOTS Program Helps Reduce Tuberculosis Rates in China

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2004-8-8

This is Robert Cohen with the VOA Special English Development
Report.

The World Health Organization says tuberculosis rates have
dropped in China thanks to the DOTS program. DOTS is a way for
countries to try to control tuberculosis.

The full name is directly observed treatment-short course.
Directly observed means that someone watches to make sure people
take their daily medicine. Full treatment usually lasts from six to
eight months.

Some people stop as soon as they feel better. That only makes the
infection more difficult to treat. The patient also remains a risk
to others.

The DOTS program calls for strong
government support.

China started its program with help from the World Bank and the
W.H.O. in nineteen-ninety-one. Health officials established the
program in half the population. After ten years researchers did a
national study of tuberculosis.

Doctors estimated there were thirty percent fewer cases in the
DOTS half than in the other half of the population. The W.H.O. says
the results prove that the program should be expanded throughout
China.

More than one million new cases of tuberculosis are reported in
China each year. India has a worse situation. The W.H.O. estimates
that forty percent of the eight million people in the world with TB
live in China or India. But the agency says those two countries and
others have made progress to reduce rates of infection.

The rates are up, however, in southern Africa and the countries
of the former Soviet Union. The AIDS virus is to blame in Africa.
Someone with H.I.V. is ten times more likely to become infected with
tuberculosis.

The situation is different in the former Soviet republics.
Experts say the disease is spreading there mostly because infected
people are not taking their medicine correctly.

A bad cough is not the only sign of tuberculosis. Others include
pain in the chest, increased body temperature and coughing up blood.
The bacteria spread through the air when the person coughs or
sneezes.

Each year about two million people die from tuberculosis. The
World Health Organization wants to expand the DOTS program to more
countries. In two thousand two, only thirty-seven percent of all
cases were treated this way.

The United Nations wants to cut in half the number of TB cases by
two thousand fifteen.

This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Jill
Moss. This is Robert Cohen.