The Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS), Department of Health, Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and Ministry of Justice and Peace (MJP) released these statistics to mark World Tuberculosis Day.
The head of the CCSS’ tuberculosis program and strategy for the care of people with respiratory diseases responsible for public health in Costa Rica Zeidy Mata, reported that in 2021 they registered 353 cases of tuberculosis, of which 236 were men and 117 women.
For this reason, Costa Rica belongs to the group of countries with a low incidence of this disease, since this rate has fluctuated between seven and eight per 100,000 inhabitants in the last four years.
After explaining that tuberculosis is an infection caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Koch’s bacillus) that mainly affects the lungs, Mata pointed out that it also occurs in other organs such as the skin, liver, kidneys, genitals and meninges can.
Of the total number of cases registered in the previous year, 304 corresponded to pulmonary tuberculosis and 49 to extrapulmonary tuberculosis.
The person in charge of the Department of Health’s tuberculosis program, Franchina Murillo, claimed that this disease is the thirteenth leading cause of death in the world and the deadliest infectious disease after Covid19 and via HIV/AIDS.
The number of deaths in the world is estimated at 1.5 million, including 214,000 in patients with HIV, he pointed out, adding that of Costa Rica’s total cases last year, 334 were tested for HIV, accounting for 95 percent , while 12 percent (41 cases) were coinfected.
For her part, PAHO/WHO representative in Costa Rica, María Dolores Pérez, pointed out that this country is among the 15 countries in the Region of the Americas with the greatest potential to be the first to make progress towards tuberculosis eradication, despite the small number of cases per year.
To do this, he stressed, Costa Rica must enter the preelimination stage with an incidence rate of less than 1 case per 100,000 people and then go into elimination with less than 0.1 cases per 100,000 people. So far, there are no countries in the preliminary or qualifying phase in the region, he explained.
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