TAJIKISTAN: Poor conditions mean TB still rife in prisons

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

DUSHANBE, 5 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Tuberculosis (TB) remains widespread in Tajikistan's prisons, where crowded conditions and an acute lack of funding is making life harder for inmates with the disease.

"The situation in terms of tuberculosis in the penitentiary institutions has been so neglected over the past few years that the registration of TB patients started only in 2004," Bakhrom Abdulkhakov, deputy head of the corrections department at the Tajik justice ministry, said in the capital Dushanbe on Wednesday.

That became possible thanks to assistance from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which provided the necessary medical equipment for the corrections department's health clinic to detect and register TB cases through its Penal Reform Initiatives project.

According to the corrections department, there are currently more than 1,600 registered TB patients in prisons. The prison population in the former Soviet republic is around 10,000, which amounts to about 160 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.

Radik Nabiulin from the Swiss Cooperation Office (SCO) in Dushanbe cited overcrowding as the primary issue fuelling the spread of TB. "The prisons are overcrowded and conditions there do not comply with international standards. Many convicts are not fed properly and as a result they get infected," Nabiulin explained.

Overcrowding causes a rise in infectious diseases, prevents working towards rehabilitation, has a negative impact on security and discipline and reduces the prison service's ability to treat prisoners, according to the SDC.

Originally planned for 5,000 inmates, Tajikistan's penitentiary system - a legacy of the former Soviet Union - currently holds double that figure. "The problem of overcrowded corrections institutions is there in every prison. The buildings are old, left from the Soviet times," Abdulkhakov conceded.

According to the Dutch-based AIDS Foundation East-West (AFEW), following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, difficult conditions in Tajik prisons were accompanied with a chronic lack of medicines and health services, poor nourishment and hygiene practices, and increasing cases of TB.

Still another cause of the problem is a lack of resources to tackle the TB issue in prisons. The government allocates around US $0.32 a day to feed one convict, leaving very little for healthcare.

"Of course, we don't have the means to feed the inmates with meat, fish and butter every day, but they get three meals every day," Abdulkhakov maintained, adding, however, that from 1 September the convicts' diet now included more proteins thanks to support from the Luxembourg-based charity Caritas.

Although more than $100,000 was provided from the state budget in 2005 for the healthcare of inmates - a 100 percent increase from 2004 - officials say that it is a scanty sum. "This amount of money will allow us only to buy aspirin, analgin and other cheap medicines, while for the treatment of TB there needs to be expensive drugs," the corrections deputy head explained.

Meanwhile, in an effort to improve living conditions in the prisons, repair and renovation work was completed in some of the facilities. "The results can be seen now. If in 2003, 157 convicts died of TB and other diseases, in 2004 that figure was reduced to 97, while over the past eight months of this year only 35 prisoners died," Abdulkhakov said.

In order to prevent TB from propagating in the prisons, patients are kept separately from the main group and the construction of a special centre to cater for 300 inmates living with TB is under way in the village of Machiton, some 20 km from Dushanbe. International organisations, including the SDC, the Global Fund to Fight TB, AIDS and Malaria, and AFES are supporting the effort.

[ENDS]