Tuberculosis - the disease in the luggage
Falling ill in a foreign country? More than 70 percent of tuberculosis cases in Germany occur in people who were not born in Germany. In order to continue to fight the disease successfully in Germany and other countries in Western Europe, a change in the prioritisation of tuberculosis control is now needed to target the groups at highest risk of contracting tuberculosis in the near future.
Measures to control tuberculosis were the focus of the 3-day RoGer-TB Congress, which took place from 29 September - 01 October 2022 in Bucharest, Romania.
More than 200 participants from all over Europe accepted the invitation of the Research Centre Borstel and the Marius Nasta Institute in Bucharest to discuss the current situation of tuberculosis control, also in view of the large number of refugees from Ukraine. Among them were the Minister of Health, Alexandru Rafila, and the Minister of Europe, Ioan Marcel Bolos, of Romania.
The highlight of the congress was the premiere of the film "Tuberculosis - the disease in the luggage" by Christian Hornung and Anke Petersen from Hamburg and Mihai Dragolea from Bucharest, which describes the stories of two patients in a sensitive way. Grigore-Gabriel, who came to Germany from Romania looking for work and then fell ill, and Caleb, a student from Nigeria who studied in Ukraine and fell ill there when war broke out.
RoGer-TB is an initiative of the Research Centre Borstel, together with the Robert Koch Institute and the German Central Committee for the Fight against Tuberculosis with funding from the GHP programme of the Federal Ministry of Health (https://ghpp.de/de/projekte/roger-tb/).
Contact
Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h.c. Christoph Lange
DZIF TTU TB (ClinTB)
T +49 4537 / 188-3010 (Sekretariat)
F +49 4537 / 188-6030
clange@fz-borstel.de