Home treatment helps South African miners beat tuberculosis

published on September 11, 2013 in The Globe and Mail

South African mine workers have always lived in mortal fear of tuberculosis. They saw miners disappearing into grim hospitals and never returning. It was seen as the end of life.

“We thought if you had TB, you should give up,” says Amos Ntlantsane, a former gold miner. “A lot of them never came back.”

So when his son caught TB last year, he felt the same anxiety. But his son, Sonwabine, didn’t vanish into an institution. Instead he was allowed to live at home while visiting a nearby clinic. “I feel a lot stronger now,” the 19-year-old says. “A hospital would have been more stressful.”

The innovative stay-at-home program is part of a growing wave of long-overdue efforts to improve TB treatment. Tuberculosis is one of the world’s biggest killers, causing 1.4 million deaths annually. It’s the leading cause of death in South Africa and many other developing nations – yet it’s long been neglected, overshadowed by AIDS and stigmatized as a disease of the poor.

About one-third of the world’s population is infected with TB (usually without being aware of it), and the percentage is as high as 80 per cent in South Africa’s impoverished townships. But only one new TB drug has been approved by U.S. regulators in the past 50 years, limiting the flow of medical resources for TB sufferers in Africa and elsewhere.

Geoffrey York
Globe and Mail
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Home treatment helps South African miners beat tuberculosis

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