12 September 2022 – Thanks to WHO’s recently opened tuberculosis (TB) centre in north-west Syria’s Al-Bab city, patients will no longer have to make the 90-minute drive to Azaz city, where the nearest TB facility had hitherto been located.
A WHO needs assessment had revealed that 20% of TB patients diagnosed in the Azaz centre were from Al-Bab city. A new facility – the fourth in the region – which covers a catchment population of 318,330, was therefore established in Al-Bab city in collaboration with a local Syrian nongovernmental organization to respond to this need.
The new TB centre has been fully equipped and will provide quality services for TB patients, including early diagnosis, radiography, laboratory tests, free medicines, monitoring and raising awareness through the community support team, house follow-up visits and psychosocial support.
The overall project aims to strengthen TB control in the Al-Bab district and the surrounding areas of Aleppo Governorate and to improve access to comprehensive TB services, which include case management as well as treatment support and outreach services. WHO, in collaboration with its partner, will achieve this goal through a multi-level approach:
supporting the operational costs of a TB centre which meets international standards, as recommended by WHO;
establishing a TB treatment support team to help TB patients take their TB medicines regularly and throughout the entire duration of their treatment; and
strengthening the ability of public health clinics in the northern Aleppo network to perform TB prevention and detection through capacity-building programmes.
The WHO field presence in Gaziantep has provided support to the TB programme in north-west Syria since 2019 for all the diagnostic, treatment, prevention and follow-up services carried out in three TB centres in Idlib, Azaz and Afrin cities.
Since March 2019, with WHO support, the TB detection and treatment success rates in the region have been greatly improved, reaching 85%. Overall, there have been 1350 confirmed TB cases and 33 confirmed multi-drug resistant TB cases registered with the TB programme in the region.