According to information obtained from a DA parliamentary question, only 52% of South Africans infected with TB are treated successfully, compared with the World Health Organisation’s target of 85%, the DA’s spokesperson on health, Dianne Kohler-Barnard, said in a statement on Monday.
”Despite this dreadful cure rate, only 3% of TB patients are benefiting from the national TB crisis management plan,” she said.
Kohler-Barnard added that the evidence suggested that the government’s programme to fight tuberculosis was ”as much of a failure” as its anti-Aids efforts.
”An independent enquiry is needed to investigate why the government’s TB programme is failing so badly,” she said.
According to the DA, the government success in treating patients with TB is dramatically different across the provinces.
According to figures from 2004, the cure rate ranges from a low of 28% in Mpumalanga to a high of 70,1% in the Western Cape, the DA noted.
”Yet even the province that is most successful does not come close to obtaining an 85% cure rate, which the WHO believes should be possible in a developing country,” it added.
”This is a terrible reflection on our government’s performance in treating a disease which, in deadly combination with Aids, is causing immeasurable misery and destruction across the country.
”The government’s response to the poor cure rate has been to launch the national TB crisis management plan in the four districts in the country with the worst cure rates. But this covers only 8 000 of the 284 000 people who tested positive for TB in 2003,” the DA noted.
It added that it is not clear that the government had actually identified the reasons for its failures.
”If the crisis plan simply involves the same formula on a more intensive scale, then the chances of success are small,” the DA said.
According to the official opposition, an independent body, possibly a South African NGO or an international health organisation, needs to investigate why the TB programme is working so poorly.
”Only then can we be sure that the money pumped into crisis management plans is being well spent,” Kohler-Barnard said. — I-Net Bridge