Tests may have been mistaken showing that South African gold miners contracted a highly drug resistant strain of tuberculosis, health officials and a gold firm said on Thursday.
A statement by the provincial department of health late on Tuesday that XDR-TB (extremely drug resistant tuberculosis) had been identified in six gold miners in the Free State, south-west of Johannesburg, sparked panic there.
But officials said on Thursday further tests were being undertaken because several of the patients were responding to treatment.
”The confounding thing is these guys have XDR, but they’re responding to conventional treatment, which is bizarre and suggests that maybe it’s not XDR,” said spokesperson Willie Jacobsz at Gold Fields. The firm, the world’s fourth biggest gold producer, has its own hospitals for employees.
So far XDR-TB has been largely confined to KZN, where 60 people have died, with only one case reported in the economic hub of Johannesburg earlier this month.
South Africa has been battling tuberculosis for years, but the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and XDR strains have emerged largely due to patients failing to properly take drugs, allowing the disease to build up defences to the treatments.
”We need to re-look again at those results … we’re possibly dealing here with a false positive,” Dr Donald Chapman, acting head of the provincial department of health, told Reuters.
Slow progressing strain
Even the XDR patients in the Free State who were not progressing as well did not appear to have the super virulent strain that emerged in KZN, which caused rapid deterioration and death within a week or two.
”In our case the scenario does not seem to be that of the KZN scenario; ours is a very slow progressing strain … The message we’re trying to get to the public is that this is definitely not the very dangerous strain,” Chapman added.
TB, an airborne illness spread through coughing and sneezing, kills an estimated 1,7-million people annually.
TB is the leading killer of those infected with HIV as it thrives in weakened immune systems, and doctors have voiced fears that a major outbreak of the deadly TB strain could sharply hike South Africa’s already heavy Aids death toll.
Jacobsz said media reports that the super virulent strain, dubbed ”Killer TB”, had spread to the key mining region of the Free State caused panic.
”Yesterday [Wednesday], there was absolute mayhem in the Free State, they were afraid to come out of their houses because they thought there was this killer TB was floating around,” he said.
Even though there was no evidence that the KZN strain had migrated to mining regions, Gold Fields was making contingency plans in case it did appear, he added.
Gold Fields has about 3 000 cases of TB among its workforce, about 12% of the total, but the company also has an 87% cure rate, higher than average, Jacobsz said.
The provincial health department had said Harmony Gold was the other company with miners who had been identified with XDR-TB, but Harmony officials were not immediately available for comment. — Reuters