Moin zusammen,
der nachstehende Text ist wieder von Adriana Stuijt (siehe ersten Beitrag).
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XDR-TB invades Lesotho from South Africa
Date Posted: Saturday 09-Jun-2007
The following was submitted by Adriana Stuijt.
XDR-TB epidemic invades Lesotho from South Africa -- already shows a 85% kill-rate...
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa. April 5 2007 -- The South African XDR-TB epidemic has now reached the landlocked mountain kingdom of Lesotho which is surrounded by South Africa, where it is showing a kill-rate of 85% of its patients already, warns Dr Kevin de Cock, World Health Organisation TB-expert, speaking at the Aids conference in Durban yesterday.
Financier George Soros has responded to the XDR-TB epidemic in South Africa by immediately pledging $3-million to finance the XDR-TB identification and treatment programme in neighbouring Lesotho.
His efforts were warmly welcomed by Lesotho senator, Dr. Mphu Ramatlapeng, the American-trained Minister of Health and Social Welfare for the kingdom.
(contact info: Telephone +266-22317707 or 22324561 Fax +266- 22321014 Email :
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http://www.health.gov.ls/minister/default.php
Meanwhile Dr Ms M K Matsau, a deputy-general of South Africa's Department of Health (DOH) has been insisting that forcibly-quarantined XDR-TB patients at the high-security state-run Sizwe Tropical Diseases Hospital in Rietfontein near Johannesburg must be released back into the community at once because their human rights are being violated. there are at least 168 drug-resistant patients in quarantine there.
Ms Matsau was unofficially left in charge of the department while her Minister was undergoing a liver transplant.
Ms Matsau went on record on April 5 2007 as saying that it was DOH policy not to infringe on the 'human rights' of any XDR-TB patients by \"forcibly detaining\" them:
\"There are much more acceptable humane ways of dealing with this infection control than forcibly incarcerating anybody,\" she said -- thus ignoring the scientific advice of the government's own TB-experts at Sizwe hospital, who refuse to release the XDR-TB patients in quarantine there, warning that they continue to pose a serious infection threat to society and could infect many thousands of people within just a few days.
News clip video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5lI3Hc5Xc
In December last year, TB patients at Sizwe hospital had rebelled and taken control of their hospital ward. Officials said some of those patients had drug-resistant TB.
The patients themselves claimed they had not seen a doctor for two months, and demanded “passes” to leave the hospital.
The police then temporarily moved these protesting patients to a more secure hospital in Pretoria, until security on Sizwe wards could be tightened.
There's now a permanent police guard posted outside the gates. In March 2007 the Sizwe Hospital manager said they were now holding 168 patients 'with drug resistant TB' -- including 18 children.
http://www.joburg.org.za/2004/nov/nov26_sizwe.stm
Doctors at Sizwe said since these XDR-TB infected patients cannot be cured with any existing drugs, they remain highly infectious and cannot be released into the community.
The Johannesburg High Court must now decide their fate.
The court date has not yet been set.
The Eastern Cape ares including Port Elizabeth and East London were identified by Radebe as one of the four countrywide districts with both the highest number of TB cases and also the lowest cure rates.
This means that MDR-TB and XDR-TB were increasingly problematic there.
Equally problematic were the entire city of greater Johannesburg in Gauteng and the entire Durban metropolitan area in KwaZulu-Natal.
LINK:
h[url]ttp://www.doh.gov.za/docs/whatsnew-f.html[/url]
http://www.doh.gov.za/docs/sp/sp0530-f.html
Hundreds of millions are latent TB carriers in Africa -- warns WHO expert
Dr. Kevin de Cock, Belgian-born head of WHO's HIV-AIDS department in Switzerland, told the Third South African AIDS Conference in June 2007 (and which was snubbed by SA's health minister) that 'traditional treatments for Africa's rampant TB problem could worsen the AIDS epidemic and fuel the spread of the potentially fatal lung infection.
TB programmes alone cannot reverse the tide, \" de Cock told some 4,000 Aids researchers, activists and healthcare officials at the conference in Durban.
link;
http://www.sa-aidsconference.com/
\"Hundreds of millions of people in Africa are latent TB-carriers , but the growing relationship between TB and HIV has made treatment of both much more difficult,\" he told the conference.
He warned that \"extremely drug resistant TB is a strain virtually immune to traditional and modern antibiotics and has raised alarm bells - it has now surfaced not only in South Africa but also in Lesotho, which is surrounded by South Africa.
\"XDR-TB is already killing 85% of those infected in Lesotho. The majority of those patients also had the human-immune deficiency virus which leads to Aids,\" he noted.
61% of annual 250,000 TB patients are HIV+ in South Africa
The conference also heard that in South Africa, 61 percent of the annual 250,000 people diagnosed with TB also have HIV. Ordinary TB is still being diagnosed using methods such as skin tests that can take days or even weeks to complete.
Treatment ranges from 6 months to a year.
The conference heard that a new urine-based dipstick test is now under development which gives almost instant results -- and could be the answer to diagnosing TB rapidly and much more widely among the general population.
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Gruß, Michael