Interactive Data Dashboards
Live indicators, province breakdowns and downloadable data.
Dr Iqbal Master could be classified a TB veteran and for good reason. For 20 years and still going strong, Dr Master has been working at the coalface of the TB epidemic, and later the drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) epidemic, in KwaZulu-Natal. Long considered the epicentre of South Africa’s HIV epidemic, unsurprisingly KwaZulu-Natal is also one…
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Dr Iqbal Master could be classified a TB veteran and for good reason. For 20 years and still going strong, Dr Master has been working at the coalface of the TB epidemic, and later the drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) epidemic, in KwaZulu-Natal. Long considered the epicentre of South Africa’s HIV epidemic, unsurprisingly KwaZulu-Natal is also one…
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NOLAST WINISI I could not walk during my illness because of the injection. I spent more than R100 on my return trip to the clinic, and it was unsustainable. My husband and I stayed in a room at a family member’s house, which was closer to the clinic. But they were very poor so the…
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Research, willpower and good administration could help halt the march of a disease that is striking down too many children: multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). The roots of tuberculosis (TB) spread back tens of thousands of years. Yet, despite all the research, it remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases, mutating into even more severe versions of…
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Six years ago, almost to the day, Mark Heywood (then head of the AIDS Law Project) warned that, while squabbling over human rights and other issues around HIV, the country had allowed the TB epidemic to grow out of control. Addressing a plenary at the TB Conference, Heywood expressed his concern that the crisis of…
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Decentralised drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) treatment to clinics is being rolled out across the country. Or is it? NSP Review visited a number of Eastern Cape clinics and interviewed patients and health workers. The picture that emerged was one of bureaucratic and poorly functioning referral systems, and no system to keep track of patients. (The names…
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Every time I diagnose a child with TB, I wonder how far we are from winning this fight against the disease. Considering that the effort put into preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV has produced outcomes that point to the potential elimination of paediatric HIV by 2015, what would it take to achieve similar successes with…
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Imagine you have been on your feet for 29 hours, running from one emergency to another, now busy inserting a drain between a patient’s ribs and thick yellow pus from a tuberculosis empyema drains out. The patient coughs and it is sprayed all over you. You perhaps worry for an instant about how much of…
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There was recently a small celebration in one of the primary care clinics in Khayelitsha. One more person was officially declared cured after more than two years of treatment for pre-XDR-TB (extensively-drug-resistant TB). It may not seem especially significant for the locals who are used to the fact that, for many years now, patients with…
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Adherence to DR-TB therapy is essential for treatment to be successful. Poor adherence may result in unsuccessful treatment outcomes, and the infection of other household and community members. In addition, resistance to an increased number of drugs can develop. At the MDR-TB think tank held in Johannesburg in early April this year, Professor Jose Caminero…
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South Africa is one of the few high burden countries where DR-TB case detection is reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be more than 100%. Based on a DR-TB prevalence survey conducted in 2002, the WHO estimates that there should have been between 6 500 and 10 100 MDR-TB cases notified in 2012.…
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While South Africa has improved case detection for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) with the introduction of the Xpert TB test, the capacity to treat patients diagnosed with Rifampicin-resistant TB has not kept pace. More individuals are being diagnosed than are treated, and many of those who don’t receive treatment die or infect others around them, or…
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