South Africa’s National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and STIs (2023 – 2028) was launched on Friday at Tlhabane Stadium in Rustenburg, North West as the world commemorated World TB Day. Nthusang Lefafa attended the event and spoke to experts and activists about the state of TB and HIV and the work that lies ahead with the new NSP.
Despite advances in paediatric TB care, substantial challenges remain. If we are to heed the call for this year’s World TB Day – ‘Yes! We can end TB’ – we will need to significantly ramp up dedicated investment for an integrated approach to addressing TB in children, argues Dr Sipho Nyathi.
Diagnosing tuberculosis is difficult in people who struggle to cough up sputum samples – a particular problem in children and people living with HIV. One promising alternative to testing sputum is to test stool. Tiyese Jeranji unpacks the latest developments in this area.
Tuberculosis (TB) can be resistant to treatment with several different drugs. Tests that identify which drugs someone’s TB is resistant to are critical to ensuring that people are not treated with drugs that don’t work for them, especially given the significant side effects associated with some of the drugs. Elri Voigt assesses the state of play in testing for TB drug resistance and the promise of exciting new technologies, such as whole genome sequencing.
Tuberculosis can be challenging to diagnose in children, especially very young children. This is because it is difficult for them to cough up the sputum required by gold standard molecular tests and because they have fewer TB organisms in their sputum than adults. X-ray screening may be part of the solution, but it has shortcomings. Following some interesting recent study findings, Tiyese Jeranji asks what role lung ultrasound may have in improving TB detection in kids.
Professor Keertan Dheda has come a long way from growing up as one of three siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise in central Durban. Biénne Huisman chatted to Dheda, now the head of the University of Cape Town’s Division of Pulmonology, and a Professor in Mycobacteriology and Global Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, about work-life balance, problem-solving that excites him, and a career dedicated to the fight against tuberculosis.
The World Health Organization estimates that over four million of the almost ten million people who fell ill with tuberculosis in 2020 were not diagnosed. One obstacle to more people being diagnosed is the fact that most current tests require people to produce sputum – something children and some people living with HIV find difficult. Tiyese Jeranji looks at a new fingerstick blood test that may help diagnose more people quicker.
