March to mark disease
Doctors, survivors and MEC take part in Mdantsane event
DOCTORS from Cecilia Makiwane Hospital joined tuberculosis survivors, and health MEC Pumza Dyantyi, yesterday for a march in Mdantsane to mark the World TB Day.
The march started at Cecilia Makiwane and ended at Nkqubela TB Hospital.
Dyantyi, who was meant to have led the crowd, was instead chauffeured from Cecilia Makiwane to the TB hospital in her luxury Audi Q7, and met the crowd at the gate of the TB hospital.
Speaking to Saturday Dispatch at the start of the march, the MEC said the event formed part of a “dialogue programme” that the national Department of Health had recommended to provinces. “The department had recommended that we hold dialogues around TB. Also, if we want to achieve the 90-90 targets set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on TB, we need to involve the public,” said Dyantyi.
The WHO recommended that the department test 90% of patients for TB. Among those found to be positive, at least 90% of them should receive treatment, so that 90% of them could be cured.
The MEC said the disease was rife in the province’s metros. “TB thrives in congested areas, and in the metros you find a lot of people that have come to seek work ending up in informal settlements, [which become] overcrowded; that makes it easy for the disease to spread faster.”
Health practitioners who took part in the march included Dr David Stead, an infectious disease specialist at Frere and Cecilia Makiwane hospitals.
Stead said 1% of the South African population contracted TB annually. He said health workers carried five times more risk of infection than the general public.
“If I were to estimate the infection rate between the two hospitals [Makiwane and Frere], I would say 70% of our admissions test positive for TB. That percentage puts a big burden on the health system,” he said.
TB survivor Nils von Delft said the journey to a TB-free life was not easy. He had to take about 4 500 pills in the space of nine months. — simthandilef@dispatch.co.za