Without special efforts to test multi-drug resistant (MDR) patients for resistance to other drugs, government will be unaware of the presence of extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) among TB patients, the director general of health said on Tuesday.
Thami Mseleku was speaking at a TB workshop in Pretoria attended by World Health Organisation (WHO) officials and delegates from the Southern African Development Community.
He said government had made diagnosis and treatment accessible to all communities and provided these services free, but ”despite all these efforts, government is not winning the battle”.
Mario Raviglione of WHO highlighted the challenges of the Global Plan, an initiative of WHO, to stop TB. He said communities were unaware and uninvolved and that the connection between TB and HIV was not clearly known.
”To eradicate XDR-TB may take a number of years because it’s not a pandemic, it comes and goes,” Raviglione said.
Raviglione said the set goals of trying to curb TB included engaging all care providers, enabling and promoting research and addressing the relationship between TB and HIV.
Medical officer Ernesto Jaramillio, also part of WHO, said diagnostic capacity in XDR-TB was only present in few countries.
”Evidence indicates that a strong TB control programme can make a fundamental contribution to preventing and controlling MDR-TB and XDR-TB,” Jaramillio said.
Official statistics show an increase in the number of TB cases detected in South Africa over the years, with a low cure rate of 50% and a high ”defaulter rate” of 10%.
These rates have resulted in a high proportion of MDR-TB patients.
Mseleku said lack of investment into research for TB drugs and new diagnostic tests had contributed to the country’s poor TB position.
”We urge pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies to correct this gap with respect to new TB drugs and new diagnostic tests.”
He said government needed to revise strategies to ensure early detection of resistant strains, and to have a surveillance system in place to monitor the resistance patterns.
Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang could not attend the workshop because she was ill. — Sapa