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Sunday is World Tubercolosis Day so health officials organized an education fair today at the Battlefield park . One of the coordinators explained why tuberculosis awareness is still important to this day.

Susan Rivero - Rural Heath Nurse, Cleopatra White
"The date is really the 24th of March but we are celebrating it today since it's a Sunday, so we are celebrating it today. What we're doing is showcasing all the other health facilities that work along with us as well. People tend to think that tuberculosis has been eradicated but we want them to know that it's still here and we want them to understand more about it and learn more about it because people can still die from and we want to make sure that they get their education that they need about it and that's why we're here and that's why the stress clinic is there and we continue to get educate on it on a daily basis. We go into work places, we do health education there, we do screening, we go at the prison, we go at different places and we do screening and health education. That is very important; the population needs to understand more about it."

"It usually starts by affecting the lungs, the main mode of transmission is inhalation, so it's just by inhaling from somebody that has tuberculosis and when this person inhales it and they get the tuberculosis, their signs and symptoms would be like coughing, coughing up blood, fever, night sweats, chills, loss of appetite, loss of weight. So those are the main signs and symptoms. Then people don't really know that there's a difference in what we call tuberculosis infection which called the latent TB whereby the person can inhale the bacteria, it stays in their body but it just lays dormant. Many people have that and they do not know right, so that is what we would test for to see if they have the TB germ in body. Then we have the TB disease or the active TB and that is when the person would get sick, they would inhale the bacteria and they would get sick - or the latent TB turns into the active TB. And when they get sick, then that is when they lose weight and the thing a lot of people don't know is that TB kills, it can it kill, but it can also be cured - the good part these is a cure."

There were 99 cases of TB in 2018 and 70 percent of cases were cured. Most cases were from Belize City.