World-leading tuberculosis researcher Professor Valerie Mizrahi was 35 when her mother Etty started losing weight and coughing furiously. After healthcare professionals in Johannesburg failed to accurately diagnose her, it was a doctor in Plettenberg Bay who told Etty: “The good news is you don’t have lung cancer, the bad news is that you have tuberculosis […]
Tag: Tuberculosis
The World Health Organisation estimates that 10.6 million people globally fell ill with TB, 1.3 million died in 2022. The Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Gates MRI) has announced the commencement of the third phase clinical trial evaluating the M72/AS01E tuberculosis (TB) vaccine candidate. According to an official statement Tuesday from the foundation, […]
Tuberculosis (TB) is a preventable and curable disease caused by a bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. TB often affects the lungs and could be deadly if not detected and cured early. However, many seem oblivious of the dangers of TB and only wait until they suffer a severe cough before suspecting they could be suffering from […]
One hundred and forty-two years after its discovery, Tuberculosis (TB) remains a global public health problem. Despite being preventable and curable, 1.3 million people died from TB in 2022, 424,000 of them in Africa and 54,200 of them in South Africa alone. Statistically, that means one life was lost to TB every 10 minutes in […]
Around the world, men are more likely to get TB and to die from it than women. We recently conducted researchto establish the various factors that explain higher rates of TB among men in South Africa. South Africa is ranked among the top six countries contributing to 60% of the global burden of TB. Our […]
The world is facing significant demographic changes. In addition, we are more at risk for new infectious outbreaks than ever before. Climate change threatens to make all these challenges even worse. While they may seem intractable, experience has shown that global cooperation provides a proven path to progress. Two decades of investment has halved child […]
South Africa’s ongoing efforts to respond to Tuberculosis (TB) have been strengthened with funding of $94 million for the next five years. “Just over R4 billion was budgeted in the 2024/2025 [financial year], meeting the projected needs for implementing the National Strategic Plan (NSP). Seventy-one percent of the TB budget is from domestic sources, 21% […]
Dr Juli Switala from Pretoria has treated children in Nigeria, helped fatally ill patients during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, and has delivered babies at Afghanistan’s Khost Maternity Hospital against a backdrop of upheaval and violence. These were some of her duties as an infectious diseases paediatrician for humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières […]
Every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), tens of thousands of people who fall ill with tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa are not diagnosed. Globally, of the estimated ten million people who get the disease annually, around four million never receive a positive test. The problem of underdiagnosis was underlined by South Africa’s […]
The World Health Organization (WHO) 2023 Global tuberculosis (TB) report underscores a significant worldwide recovery in the scale-up of TB diagnosis and treatment services in 2022. It shows an encouraging trend starting to reverse the detrimental effects of COVID- 19 disruptions on TB services. Featuring data from 192 countries and areas, the report shows that […]
Detecting tuberculosis early could play a significant role in eradicating the world’s most deadly infectious disease. The World Health Organization says 1.5 million people die from this devastating disease each year. People infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the TB bacteria that attack the lungs, often do not know that they have it until their symptoms become […]
The current treatment for drug-susceptible tuberculosis (TB) used in South Africa involves a combination of four antibiotics, last for six months, effectively cures TB, and is dirt cheap. Some people, however, find it hard to complete the full six months of treatment – in some cases due to side effects and in other cases because […]
2023 was a busy year for healthcare in South Africa. There were several policy developments, landmark court cases, important pieces of legislation, and some changes in leadership. Yet, take a step back and not much seems to have changed. Shortages of healthcare workers persist, corruption is still rife, budgets tight, and our health governance crisis […]
A massive and much-anticipated phase 3 trial of an experimental tuberculosis (TB) vaccine is set to proceed after funding for it has been secured from two large philanthropies. Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) Wednesday announced they’d be investing a combined $550 million into the trial – around $150 million from Wellcome […]
Mrs Tinubu dedicated the investiture to one of her staff, who she said lost his life to the disease, and to others with similar fate. Nigeria’s First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu, has donated N1 billion through the Renewed Hope Initiative (RHI) to support the fight to end the Tuberculosis epidemic in Nigeria by 2030. Mrs Tinubu […]
The uptake and continuation of tuberculosis (TB) preventive therapy were much higher when it was provided through a community-based model compared to the standard clinic-based model, a study conducted in KwaZulu-Natal found. The findings were presented at the recent Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle, USA. Among others, TB preventive therapy is recommended […]
Bulawayo — The United Nations General Assembly is convening a high-level meeting on Tuberculosis (TB) to get a political commitment for increased funding for programmes and research to end an old disease that today kills more people than AIDS and COVID. TB, an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, kills 1.5 million people annually, according […]
It is interesting to see, from my vantage point in South Africa, the reaction to the slight rise in tuberculosis (TB) cases in the U.S. Overall, TB in the U.S. has declined steadily since the early 1950s. But in the past few years, TB incidence has started to slowly increase. While the percentages seem steep, […]