Deputy President David Mabuza accompanied by Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi, provincial Health MEC Sibongiseni Dlomo joined academics and delegates at the opening of the 5th South African TB conference in Durban. This year’s theme is “Step Up – let’s embrace all to end TB”.
The four-day conference is expected to look at innovative ways of finding and treating the disease.
In South Africa provinces with the highest burden of TB include KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, Gauteng and Western Cape.
In his opening address Mabuza said they had set a target of tracing at least 160 000 undiagnosed TB patients in South Africa in the current financial year.
Various stakeholders in the health sector are concerned about Tubercolosis as it continues to kill millions across the globe.
During the opening of the 5th South African TB conference in Durban, academics agreed that the disease, although curable, leads to too many deaths.
Conference Chairperson Dr Margot Uys highlighted some of the issues the conference will focus on. She says an important factor is identifying undiagnosed TB patients in various communities.
“What are the burning issues that prevent us from reaching final elimination of the epidemic we have almost halved the number of TB patients on treatment since 2008. We now have to focus on the last hurdle towards the final elimination. With that in mind, we have identified the following themes for the conference as vital steps towards ending TB number one, finding the missing TB patients, social and biological factors impacting on the TB cascade focus of the marginalised populations and communities managing drug resistant TB innovations and new treatment options in a patient centric approach.”
Deputy President David Mabuza who officially opened the conference, says South Africa has made progress in fighting TB. He says they have set a target of identifying about 160 000 undiagnosed TB patients in the current financial year.
“In addition with the introduction of the new drugs for the treatment of drug resistant TB our success rate for the 2015 is just under 70 percent, we are struggling a bit as a country in finding people who are infected with TB , I heard all of you complaining about this missing group of people and I am sure if we all stand up we will find them , some estimate the number to be at 200 000, some estimate different estimates but we have set ourselves a target of 160 000 that we must find in this financial year.”
Mabuza emphasised that the undiagnosed TB patients are unknowingly spreading the disease. “Undiagnosed TB infected persons constitute a significant mobile and very visible infectious pool of people that every day, unknowingly, spread the disease to others including children. So these missing group of people is a question of must that we must find them because unknowingly they spread the disease and making it very difficult for us to combat it.”
The conference will focus on a variety of topics such as finding these missing patients in settings where people congregate – including prisons and health care facilities like clinics. Click below for more on the story:
