In 2020 TB case detection fell by almost 20% and mortality rose for the first time in a decade. These setbacks are directly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The world needs game-changing tools to prevent more TB cases and deaths.
NOAH SEELAM/AFP via Getty Images
Matthew Quaife, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Finn McQuaid, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Manufacturers and health systems have shown that vaccines can be quickly and effectively deployed when accompanied by keen political and financial commitments.
Indira Govender, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI); Alison Grant, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI); Al Leslie, UCL; Emily B. Wong, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI), and Yumna Moosa, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI)
Progress against tuberculosis has long been inadequate to reach the target of elimination by 2030. But before the COVID-19 pandemic the world was making steady progress in diagnosing and treating TB.
Wybalenna, Flinders Island: the Aboriginal settlement 1847.
Courtesy of Libraries Tasmania
BCG remains the only widely available vaccine for TB. Yet the development of a COVID-19 vaccine over the last year shows that there is capacity to rapidly create new vaccines.
Healthcare worker, Boitsholo Mfolo, inside the digital x-ray truck at one of Africa Health Research Institute’s mobile screening camps in rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
Samora Chapman/ Africa Health Research Institute
Emily B. Wong, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI)
South Africa needs a public health response that expands the successes of the country’s HIV testing and treatment programme to provide care for multiple diseases.
Missing targets to end HIV in children represents nothing less than a global failure.
Sunil Pradhan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Not achieving the targets for children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa means that new infections will continue to increase and HIV related mortality will be a reality for decades to come.
The key actions needed to end AIDS are relatively clear. The question is whether every government, funder, and implementing organisations will apply them.
If left untreated, latent TB infection can progress to TB disease.
Mujahid Safodien/AFP via Getty Images
Emily B. Wong, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) and Alison Grant, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI)
South Africa’s long-awaited TB prevalence survey results were recently released. They reveal that the country has a much higher burden of TB than previously thought.
“We saw patients dying for avoidable reasons. They were dying because masks that came loose were not being replaced,” says MSF COVID-19 intervention nursing activities manager, Caroline Masunda.
Chris Allan
Where there are not enough health workers to deliver medical care, one solution is to move certain tasks to less specialised health workers, a process called task-shifting.
Some insights into previous outbreaks of human coronaviruses may be useful in explaining the comparatively ‘low’ numbers of COVID-19 infections and mortality in people with HIV in South Africa.
A woman carries a bucket of fresh water to an informal settlement in Khayelitsha,Cape Town.
Nesri Padayatchi, Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and Kogie Naidoo, Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
The redirection of resources to COVID-19 has enormous consequences for the provision of healthcare services for other diseases, in particular, HIV programmes.
Head of the Immunology Research Group at the Division of Molecular Biology & Human Genetics, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University
Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne; Senior Research Fellow, Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne