The First Lady, Remi Tinubu has said advocacy on awareness and prevention of Tuberculosis is a priority even as she reechoed the fact that every child deserves a chance at a healthy and fulfilling life.
She was speaking at the side event organised by Concordia at the ongoing 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York.
According to a statement by her media aide, Busola Kukoyi, the First Lady spoke at the two separate sessions on the importance of innovation towards achieving an AIDS free generation and health standards and investment towards effectively financing the eradication of tuberculosis.
She said, on both tuberculosis and AIDS in children, Nigeria’s advocacy especially at the national, state and community levels would be pursued vigorously as Nigeria has no reason to have high statistics of prevalence in both areas.
Remi Tinubu emphasized that with the heightened drive of the President Bola Tinubu Administration in the health sector, she will be advocating enhanced actions by the wives of governors from the states of the Federation to take the campaign about awareness and prevention to the grassroot.
“Innovative approaches can be employed to develop effective methods for HIV prevention. Educational technology hubs, educational apps and digital platforms can all be used to disseminate accurate information specific to HIV care and control.
Advancement in testing facilitates early detection and prompt linkage to care thus preventing progression and transmission”.
“Creative and culturally tailored age-appropriate interventions using technology and social media, can promote and amplify safer sexual and reproductive practices”.
The First Lady seized the opportunity to explain that in Nigeria, there is a robust program for combating TB through the National TB and Leprosy control program which is domiciled in the Federal Ministry of Health supervised by the Minister for Health.
She said the President Tinubu administration has come up with the Renewed Hope Agenda and has emphasized severally, the commitment to restructure the Health System in the country through improved financing, provision of modern equipment for diagnosis, capacity building, training of health care workers and transparency in governance as it regards TB response and health care delivery as a whole.
“We need to get people to speak up and know that early detection makes it treatable and we need to see that stigmatization is removed”.
Other panelists included; Dr Lucica Ditiu and Dr Jay Rajda who both harped on the need for sustainable patnerships and improved funding.
Senator Tinubu was one of the panelists at strategies to advance global health standards and investments towards effectively financing the eradication of tuberculosis.
