Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis

Two years ago Mopeli Mofoka, 39, left his wife and child in Maseru, Lesotho's capital, and joined the more than 50,000 men pushed by poverty and unemployment in their home country to seek work on mines in neighbouring South Africa. It was his second stint as a miner the first had been 15 years earlier. This time he was hired as a sub-contractor, which meant that despite testing positive for HIV during his preliminary health screening he did not have access to the on-site health services available to mine employees. When his health began deteriorating 18 months later, he went to a local public hospital but was turned away because he lacked a South African identity document. His only option was to return home, where he is receiving treatment for tuberculosis (TB) at a government clinic run in partnership with international medical aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontires (MSF) in Morija, about 50km south of Maseru, the capital.

The aim of the study was to describe the health seeking behaviour of HIV positive patients with TB. the research question was: Why do HIV + TB patients fail to complete treatment more frequently than HIV-TB patients?

Nearly 50 000 people in the Western Cape are receiving treatment at provincial health facilities for tuberculosis. Of these, 450 people are being treated for the multidrug-resistant (MDR) strain and 55 for extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB, says Health MEC Marius Fransman.

While squabbling over human rights and other issues of HIV, South Africa has allowed the tuberculosis epidemic to spread out of control.

People in low-resource countries who are ill with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) will get a faster diagnosis in two days, not the standard two to three months and appropriate treatment thanks to two new initiatives unveiled today by WHO, the Stop TB Partnership, UNITAID and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND).

TB is South Africa's leading natural cause of death. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang opened South Africa's first national tuberculosis (TB) conference this week with some welcome good news: her department is to acquire technology that will reduce the time it takes to diagnose drug-resistant TB from as long as four months to less than a week.

A month after Health Minister Dr Richard Kamwi officially announced the presence of the deadly extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) in Namibia, the country has yet to start treating the first eight cases.

The rising tide of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa may finally be brought under control after a public-sector laboratory demonstrated it can routinely diagnose such forms of the disease within hours instead of weeks. The performance by the Greenpoint laboratory of the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) could revolutionise diagnosis of multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant TB.

Africa will not achieve the United Nations-set sixth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halting and reversing the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) by 2015. Speaking at the SA Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative symposium in Cape Town, Dr. Marcos Espinal, Executive Secretary of the Stop TB Partnership, described TB as a human disgrace that has been in place for thousands of years.