PRESS RELEASE: Tuberculosis treatment: Continuous care for refugees must be ensured

Medical experts expect tuberculosis patients to be among the people who have fled the war in Ukraine. "That's why it must now be ensured that these people receive seamless medical care so that their treatment is successful," says Professor Torsten Bauer, President of the German Society for Pneumology and Respiratory Medicine (DGP). Depending on the complexity of this bacterial lung disease, tuberculosis treatment can last at least six and sometimes more than 20 months. "If treatment is interrupted for just eight weeks, it has to start all over again," says Professor Tom Schaberg, lead author of the German tuberculosis guideline. The DGP is calling on healthcare policy-makers to strengthen the structures for the outpatient and inpatient care of refugees as quickly as possible and at the same time to guarantee the unbureaucratic assumption of costs. "We have sufficient care capacities in Germany. We have long since developed the concepts for such emergency situations, but those providing treatment must not be left with the additional costs," says Bauer, head physician at a Berlin lung clinic.