Mandela talks about his TB
‘I was in jail when they took a specimen of my sputum. I was diagnosed with TB. When the report came back from hospital they indicated that fortunately we sent the specimen before there were holes in the lung. It would take only about four months to cure the TB if I treated it correctly.
‘I went to my friends in prison ‘ Walter Sisulu and others – and told them I was found to have TB. There were long faces. My friends objected to me sharing my personal affairs but I consoled them that the hospital staff knew about my status and I had no reason to hide this information from those close to me.
‘I underwent treatment and was completely cured after four months,’ he said.
Emphasising the importance of disclosure and the support of friends, Mandela said he followed a similar pattern when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
‘I spoke about it openly because I knew that once people were aware of the facts, they would support me,’ he said.
Mandela said the world had made defeating AIDS its top priority, but TB was often ignored.
‘Today we call on the world to recognize that we can’t fight AIDS unless we do much more to fight TB as well,’ he said.
In Africa, up to 40 percent of AIDS deaths are due to TB and worldwide TB is the leading cause of death in people with HIV/AIDS.
In an effort to develop new strategies to control HIV-related TB, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a grant of $44,7 million to support the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS-TB Epidemic (CREATE).
Create is led by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Tuberculosis Research in the United States. It will use the funds to conduct three large-scale community studies over seven years in Zambia, South Africa and Brazil.
The South African study will examine the impact of isoniazid preventive therapy on TB among South African gold miners ‘ many of whom have a latent TB infection rate of more than 90 percent, high rates of HIV and silicosis.
A third of the world’s population lives with the TB germ in their lungs. While people are healthy, this germ does not cause active TB. However, as HIV has spread and the number of people with compromised immune systems has increased, more and more people become sick and may die from TB which is an entirely treatable and curable disease.
The Gates Foundation also announced a further grant of almost a million dollars to the Treatment Action Group (TAG) ‘ a New York based organization renowned for mobilizing activists and educating people with HIV/AIDS about treatment issues.
‘We as AIDS activists failed to include TB into our agenda at a much earlier point,’ said TAG executive director, Mark Harrington. He added that HIV still accounted for 23% of the TB cases in the United States. ‘TB-HIV is not just a problem for developing countries,’
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