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Tuberculosis, already the most serious health issue in Papua New Guinea, is on the rise, at the same time health officials are struggling to import enough drugs to fight it.
A number of importers in PNG have struggled to bring goods in because of the difficulty finding foreign exchange, which is being tightly controlled by the central bank, the Bank of PNG.
Most notably among these importers is fuel retailer, Puma, which has been forced to ration supplies at times over the past six months.
RNZ Pacific's PNG correspondent, Scott Waide said it's a serious situation with knock-on effects to the the health system which is currently dealing with two issues.
"The first is a rise in TB cases post-covid. There's been a 19 percent increase, so about 7000 new cases on top of the 30,000 that we already have in the country.
"And on top of that, you've got the difficulty of getting medicines on time, because there's a foreign currency shortage, and the health department can't get its cheques cleared in order to purchase the medicines on time."
Waide said, according to a brief released the Department of Health yesterday, international partners such as the World Bank, the Australian Government and others, have been called on to help plug the gaps in the medicine shortages, specifically drugs to combat TB.
Waide added that all of that has put pressure on the health system.
But he said the response from within PNG has not been entirely favourable.
"The Ministry of Health has said to the central bank, they've got some money for the drugs, it's just the central bank has been very tight-fisted in terms of rationing the foreign currency in addressing those needs.
"It's a whole spectrum of needs that it has to work with. One of them, the fuel shortages, which are very obvious. And the other most pressing is medicines and the understanding of how the central bank works.
"What are the rationales behind rationing and who gets first priority; very few people understand all that. So it's very frustrating coming from a space where you don't understand what's happening within the central bank."
Waide said that as well as the current crisis, covid-19 has badly hindered the health system and it was not yet back to a situation where it could deal with any outbreaks in PNG.
"During the covid period there were restrictions, and people couldn't go to the hospitals and couldn't access drugs. And that gave partly a rise to this increase in the new cases.
"It's a complex issue and a combination of causes that have led to this. It's an increase over time from 2021 to 2022. There's enough capacity to deal with it, but the money's not coming through. There's a budget shortfall and also foreign currency rationing, so two things on different fronts."
