From the ground up: Building a drug-resistant TB programme in Uganda

Uganda is one of the world's 22 high burden countries for tuberculosis (TB). Despite having a national treatment programme for drug-sensitive TB, there has been an emergence of drug-resistant strains of the disease, which are presenting a new and urgent threat to people's health. So far in Uganda, 226 cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) have been confirmed, spread across 40 districts, but the true figure is likely to be much higher.

As the Ugandan government prepares to start treating people with DR-TB, MSF is convinced that its focus should be on providing comprehensive, decentralised and community-based care.

In this report, MSF calls on all key stakeholders to assure quality rapid TB diagnosis, treatment and care, and argues that a scale-up of the decentralised and community-based approach, including access to second-line TB drugs at district level, is the most feasible method of averting the country's impending health crisis.