Dr Charles Sandy, the deputy director, HIV/Aids and TB unit in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, has said that his ministry will engage prophets and traditional healers in the government’s treatment programmes. Sandy said that it was imperative because traditional healers and prophets wield a lot of influence and are usually the first port of call for most people. Said Sandy,
We have seen that within a significant proportion of our population, their first port of call, when they get ill, is the traditional healer or the church and sometimes they spend too long a time before a diagnosis is made.
We hope that by engaging these particular groups of leaders and also providing them information on TB, they would then be able to assist in the early referral of TB cases to our facilities.
This will then help us to actually identify some of the missing cases that we think we have much earlier and initiate them on treatment.
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