The West Africa AIDS Foundation (WAAF) is advocating the involvement of Tuberculosis (TB) patients in matters that concern them and also strengthen the voices of African advocates to improve health and wellbeing across the continent.

The WAAF “Nothing for us without us” project, seeks to strengthen meaningful engagement of TB infected persons and their affected community for the desired impact, Dr Naa Ashiley Vanderpuije, Chief Executive Officer of WAAF, said at the launch of the project in Accra.

The project would nominate people for TB international platforms and build capacity of its members through increasing communities’ knowledge, skills, tools, and opportunities for advocacy to ensure universal access to TB services, including quality diagnostic and treatment resources

Chief Austin Arinze Obiefuna, a WHO consultant who spoke on the global fund programmes in Ghana said the fund has moved from the passive role of stop TB partnership to a more active management; from a Global Fund defined timeline to a country defined timeline to optimise impact.

He called on the partnership to plan ahead, strengthen national strategies, involve key groups, consolidate and use updated information and ensure that the Country Coordinating Mechanism and Principal recipients could do the work they have been entrusted with.

The Regional TB Co-ordinator, Mrs Dorothy Abudey, said TB is preventable, while treatment is free in all certified public and private health institutions.

She said the TB Control Programme has come far from taking an injection and a five drug a day to a fix dose drug and now to a facility case detection.

Mrs Budey noted that TB anywhere is TB everywhere while everybody is at risk and asked patients to complete their treatment.

TB is a contagious bacterial infection which mostly attacked the lungs although it could also attack any organ in the body.

The disease is transmitted from a sick patient to another through coughing, singing and sneezing and its major symptoms are coughs, which last for more than two weeks, loss of weight, tiredness, night sweats, chest pain and cough with blood stained sputum.