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Photo: Almaty Oblast TB Dispensary

Two-year old Adil, after treatment at the Almaty tuberculosis center, is one of 18,000 Kazakhs whose lives were saved by improved TB treatment.

Adil was only seven months old when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB). When he was admitted to the Almaty Oblast TB Dispensary in December 2005, he weighted only 13 pounds, and his family feared for the boy’s life. But thanks to the dispensary’s effective treatment strategy and high quality services provided by the USAID-trained doctor, this little boy successfully recovered from a disease that often ends in tragedy in Kazakhstan.

Adil is one of more than 18,000 Kazakh lives that USAID has helped save over eight years. Since 1998, USAID has been assisting the Kazakh government in fighting this dangerous disease by implementing a proven strategy against TB known as Directly Observed Treatment Short-Course (DOTS) throughout the country. In addition to providing free medication and reliable diagnostics, the DOTS strategy ensures that TB patients are supervised by a specialist throughout the treatment course — this has proven to be far more effective in permanently curing the disease than other efforts against TB. USAID and its partner organizations have opened 10 TB centers that continually provide training in DOTS to Kazakh doctors and medical specialists. Since the program began, the centers have trained more than 5,000 TB specialists, doctors, laboratory specialists, and nurses to apply DOTS in the treatment of TB patients. Additionally, USAID supported creation of a national Electronic Surveillance Case-Based Management System to track TB cases.

To ensure that efforts to eradicate tuberculosis are effective, Kazakhstan’s government has been collaborating with USAID in its effort and supplying TB medications free of charge. This collaboration and the DOTS strategy have had a tremendous impact. Tuberculosis-related deaths fell from 38.4 per 100,000 in 1998 to 20.8 in 2005 — a 46.3 percent drop. As the DOTS strategy reaches more areas of Kazakhstan, more children like Adil will recover quickly and grow up to become strong, healthy adults.

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