Last year, Portugal recorded 18 new cases of tuberculosis per every 100,000 inhabitants, a year in which 18 percent of those cases were among people born outside of the country.
This is a rise which has lead health authorities in collaboration with other entities to develop action strategies.
Provisional data released at the end of last week for the occasion of World Tuberculosis Day confirmed that the incidence rate of new cases in Portugal has dropped, but the number of cases occurring among foreign nationals has grown.
Through the National Programme for AIDS, HIV Infection and Tuberculosis, Portugal’s health board (DGS) indicates that 18 percent of tuberculosis cases registered in 2016 occurred in citizens born outside of this country.
“A rise in this proportion in recent years leads the National Programme to develop strategies with the High Commissioner for Migration and immigration and borders authority, SEF, with a view to reducing the number”, the DGS explained in a statement.
In 2015, the last year for which definitive figures are available, “HIV tests were carried out in 88 percent of tuberculosis patients, 12 percent of which were positive.”
“Portugal still has one of the highest rates of tuberculosis/HIV infection in Western Europe, which motivates the Programme to outline strategies that aim to improve tuberculosis screening among the HIV-positive population, and identify preventative barriers to treatment for this population”, the statement explains.
The health authority highlighted a “reduction in tuberculosis cases among the prison population and the drug-taking population, which is a reflection of the work already carried out among these groups.”
On 13 October last year, Francisco George, head of the DGS, said that the incidence of tuberculosis in Portugal in 2015 was of 19.2 cases per every 100,000 inhabitants.
Meanwhile, specialists have warned that tuberculosis that is resistant to various types of medicines is on the rise across the globe, and reversing decades of progress in tackling the disease.
Researchers behind a new study launched in South Africa and published in the British specialist journal Lancet said that while new antibiotics may be coming onto the market, more efficient testing is needed to channel each specific case to the right treatment.
Otherwise, they said, new drugs will be useless in stopping a rise in the number of strains of tuberculosis that are highly resistant to various types of drugs.
Tuberculosis is the infectious disease which every year kills most people globally.
Figures indicated that in 2015 some 1.8 million people died due to the disease, 60 percent of whom were from one of six countries: India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa.