Sowetan reports that all doctors and nurses could soon be subjected to annual TB tests as health minister Aaron Motsoaledi ups the ante on the rampant infection.
Speaking at the University of Cape Town, Motsoaledi said the long-awaited policy to protect health workers against TB could become a reality after the May 8 elections. The policy, which has been in the pipeline for three years, is meant to address the fact that the TB infection rate of 21% among SA health workers is second only to China’s rate of 30%.
TB is the leading cause of death in SA and affects 60% of HIV-positive people.
Addressing UCT academics and students during a memorial lecture in honour of infectious disease specialist Stephen Lawn, who died of cancer in 2016, Motsoaledi said despite SA being one of the most developed countries in Africa with advanced medicine, it was still crippled by TB.
He said the country would start screening every clinic patient in an effort to identify the 160,000 TB patients believed to be undiagnosed, untreated and infectious.
“We have undertaken to find at least half of these, or 80,000, by the end of next year. You can imagine the number that is still out there with TB, which is not followed up. That is why we emphasise that the health system must put more emphasis on primary health than it is doing today,” he said.
The department had already started intensifying its TB contact-tracing programme, and between April and December 2018 it found 38,000 people who had TB but were undiagnosed, by following up on TB patients and screening their relatives.
Motsoaledi said TB contact-tracing must include health workers who were at high risk of infection. “Perhaps the time has arrived that all health workers must be tested for TB … not screened, tested. By testing I mean lining up all the health workers and putting them through Gene-Xpert [a diagnostic machine] or X-rays. We must have health workers tested, maybe once a year, because many of them are vulnerable to TB.
“My heart breaks when I visit clinics, and I see many of them … the number of nurses who I can’t even look in the eye and see their level of bitterness,” said Motsoaledi.
“They don’t have an ordinary TB but have MDR-TB, which they got from patients. The number of doctors who also get MDR-TB is alarming. We think that the time has come, and we believe that very soon we will be introducing that policy and health workers must be tested once a year.”
The SA Medical Association welcomed Motsoaledi’s proposal but suggested it should apply to everyone who worked in clinics and hospitals, including cleaners.
The original of this Sowetan report by Sipokazi Fokazi appeared on page 4 of Sowetan of 5 April 2019
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