Posted on August 9, 2004 at 3:55 p.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — UAB’s Gorgas Tuberculosis (TB) Initiative, in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization’s Regional Program on TB, will host the second International Workshop on TB Control in Prisons, August 18-20, in Lima, Peru. National TB program and prison system directors from 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries will attend.
“Globally, there is more tuberculosis today than ever before with nearly nine million new cases and 1.8 million deaths from the disease each year,” said Dr. Michael Kimerling, UAB associate professor of medicine and director of the Gorgas TB Initiative. “The pool of infected persons is even larger with nearly one in three persons worldwide infected with the TB organism. Developing countries bear most of the burden.”
TB in prisons is of particular concern. “The rate of TB in prisons may be as much as 100 times the rate of TB among the general population,” Kimerling said. “Also troubling, many prisoners have multi-drug resistant TB that is much more difficult to treat.”
Many prisoners come from low-income communities where the rate of disease is higher and access to care is limited. “Once in prison, conditions such as overcrowding, poor ventilation, repeated transfers of prisoners and inadequate medical care facilitate the spread of infection,” Kimerling said.
The TB workshop will focus on assessing progress made since the group met last year and setting action plans for the coming year. “TB is not an unavoidable consequence of incarceration and it is not a part of a person’s sentence; it can be controlled through therapy and improvements in prison conditions,” Kimerling said.
Action plans are based on the internationally recognized TB control method known as DOTS (directly observed therapy strategy). “There are five key components: government commitment, disease detection using microscopy, standardized treatment, a stable drug supply and a standardized recording and reporting system,” Kimerling said.
The workshop will be presented in Spanish and interpreted into English. Countries that will be represented are Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
The Gorgas TB Initiative is a program of UAB’s School of Public Health. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development through the Child Health Research Project and conducts activities aimed at developing model projects and partnerships in international TB control.
More information is available online at www.paho.org/english/ad/dpc/cd/tb-prisons-2004.htm or by contacting UAB’s Gorgas TB Initiative at gorgastb@uab.edu or (205) 934-1731.