/ 16 November 2006

Eastern Cape soothes super TB fears

The Eastern Cape health department says it is not correct that extreme-drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) patients at a Port Elizabeth hospital are being kept in the same wards as other TB patients.

This follows a protest on Wednesday by about 40 patients at the Jose Pearson TB hospital with the less virulent multi-drug resistant (MDR) strain of the disease, who believed they were being housed alongside XDR cases.

According to provincial health department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo, the protesting patients had wanted to go home — a move which would have put other members of the community at risk.

Security guards shut the gates to keep them in, hospital management intervened and the situation was calm on Thursday morning, Kupelo said.

He said Jose Pearson, with a total number of 218 patients, all MDR cases, was the only facility in the province that dealt with MDR.

Sputum tests on some of the patients, the results of which came through this week, had shown that nine had the XDR strain.

They had been moved to isolation wards in the hospital, along with one XDR case identified in King William’s Town.

Kupelo said that when new patients were subsequently brought into the general wards to take up the beds vacated by the XDR cases, the other patients assumed incorrectly that the new arrivals were also XDR cases.

This was what sparked the protest.

“The action was unnecessary, really,” Kupelo said. “We hope they will listen and comply with the rules of the hospital.”

Kupelo said XDR isolation wards had also been established in King William’s Town, East London and at the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital in Mthatha, but that these were currently unoccupied.

The nine XDR cases identified at Jose Pearson all came from the Port Elizabeth-Grahamstown area.

He said department officials and politicians would take part in a TB awareness campaign in the Nelson Mandela metro — which includes Port Elizabeth — on November 24. — Sapa