New York- More than 28,000 cases of tuberculosis were detected and notified in Morocco last year.
New York- More than 28,000 cases of tuberculosis were detected and notified in Morocco last year.
Morocco registered 28,135 new cases of tuberculosis in 2014, according to the latest report by the World Health Organization (WHO), published on Wednesday, October 28.
The three different types of the disease can be classified as bacteriologically confirmed, clinically diagnosed, and extra-pulmonary.
According to the same report, 12,302 new cases in Morocco were bacteriologically confirmed in 2014, with 1,189 cases treated for relapse.
2,436 cases were clinically diagnosed with 97 relapses and 13,397 cases were considered extra-pulmonary with 422 relapses.
Morocco’s Ministry of Health released preliminary figures of the respiratory disease in March 2015. The number of cases declared in the WHO’s October report increased slightly from the 27,545 confirmed by the ministry.
Previously treated cases in 2014 excluding relapses summed 881, according to the WHO, and only 7 percent of TB patients were under the age of 4.
The age group with the most cases of TB were 25-34 years old among males and 15-24 among females, the report noted.
One of the main objectives of the MAD 250 million “national plan of accelerating the reduction in the incidence of tuberculosis” that was launched in 2013, is to increase detection rate to 95 percent by 2016.
According to the WHO, Morocco’s success rate among new TB cases was 88 percent in 2014.
Globally, the World Health Organization detected over 1.5 million deaths of tuberculosis in 2014, out of which 890,000 were men, 480,000 women and 140, children, the report noted.