 Good update. The World Tuberculosis Day is observed yearly to raise awareness about the serious bacteria disease that affects the health of the lungs. The day also highlights the social and economic consequences of tuberculosis along with its health impacts globally. Plastic BDU's Health Correspondent Gózika, or HSC, reports that medical experts say tuberculosis is a national emergency now in Nigeria. Tuberculosis remains one of the world's deadliest infectious killers. Each day, over 4,100 people lose their lives to TB and close to 28,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease according to World Health Organization. Global efforts to combat TB have saved the next method 66 million lives since the year 2000. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed years of progress made in the fight to end TB. For the first time over a decade, TB deaths increased in 2020. One of the major reasons was the disruption in access to TB services and the reduction in resources. Dr. Ndidi Mouzu, a TB consultant and community physician with over 20 years of experience, says that investing in TB isn't about fund, rather the need to save more and do more. Currently now spending for TB in-house is low. A lot of efforts are coming from outside the country. So we need to also get our governments, our communities, our hospitals, everybody to contribute their own quota insurance, HMOs, insurance, national health insurance scheme. Everybody should contribute their own quota in ensuring that we are spending money to get rid of this disease. This disease is terrible. Not only does it kill, the person that has TB is capable of giving 12 to 15 people in a year. This deadly but curable disease has different symptoms and is contagious. However, according to Dr. Ndidi, Nigerians should be scared about the disease as they've ranked the highest burden of TB in Africa. Fever, weight loss, night sweats. The cough doesn't have to be the very strong one because I don't want this patient to wait until he has severe TB. Now it's severe TB that we can say ah we don't see so many but that person that has mild form of TB can still die from that TB if he's not treated. So once the cough is there no matter how soft or night it is, please take this puttum and have it tested using gene expert. The reason why we talk about gene expert and trunet which are new technologies because they also help us test for resistant TB. So not just to see if it's the normal TB that majority of people will have but if there's resistance we have to go straight to the resistant TB drugs. Fever, it doesn't have to be very high. It could be mild fever, it could be recurrence okay because it's a chronic illness. The fever is not always very high. Weight loss, the person who is ill loses weight. If he's a child, the child doesn't gain weight as he should and night sweats and the night sweats as a result of fever breaking. That is why there's this drenching night sweats amongst sufferers of TB. Ramon Hazan, a 48-year-old TB killer's survivor who initially thought he had malaria before discovering he had TB after tests. She has his experience and how his treatment improved his health positively. I was just smoking. It was the last day that I'm going to die that I will not be on earth. That was that day I came back to this hospital here. I went through difficulties of challenges. I don't sleep well. I find it difficult to eat. Instead of me to eat, I would love to use alcoholic to take my time just to sleep. Medical experts advise people with prolonged cough and fever to visit the hospital and get treatment as it's free and available in Nigeria. They say once the lungs are damaged, treatment may continue but a miracle will bath with survival. Mkozika, Ohio Chessie, Plus TV News.