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Why Is 'TB-Alert UK' Not Warning
About XDR-TB In South Africa?

By Adriana Stuijt
Exclusive to Rense.com
6-5-7
 
THE NETHERLANDS -- The following message was sent by retired SA medical journalsit Adriana Stuijt to the TB-Alert UK organisation (email: awareness@tbalert.org) -- as follows:
 
"As a retired medical journalist in South Africa who covered the Aids-epidemic from its very start in 1984, I believe that the SA government is deliberately keeping silent about the out-of-control XDR-TB epidemic which is now entering the mainstream population in this country and even beginning to kill previously healthy people. Their last official news update with the latest death-toll figures date back to April 2007. From my own information, at least 1,000 people have already died in SA of XDR-TB thus far and enb estimated new 30 patients a day are being diagnosed with it countrywide, in every SA province. And those are just the patients who report to TB- clinics: the World Health Organisation warned just a few weeks ago that they don't know exactly how widespread XDR-TB has become in South Africa.
 
"Shouldn't TB Alert be warning very actively in many high-profile TV and news media interviews about the fact that more than 1,054 people per 100,000 of the KwaZulu-Natal population are now being diagnosed as infected with XDR-TB? At least two TB-hospitals are so overrun with XDR-TB patients now that they have turned their entire hospitals into XDR-TB hospices - sending 'ordinary TB' patients to other hospitals for treatment.
 
Isn't TB-Alert UK worried about the fact that the SA government is so anti-science that it now is actually suing a TB-hospital in Gauteng with demands that they release thirteen so-called 'forcibly detained' XDR-TB patients because their 'human rights are being violated?"
 
The management of Sizwe Hospital for tropical diseases in Johannesburg won't release these patients because they are untreatable with existing medicines and thus remain highly infectious -- they continue to pose a dangerous health risk to society if they were to be released. View the SA state-broadcaster SABC-TV's news item about this class-action law suit against Sizwe hospital in Johannesburg here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zz5lI3Hc5Xc
 
It is very clear to me by now that the South African government maintains such an unscientific and indeed confused policy towards the XDR-TB epidemic that this confusion is allowing this untreatable and very deadly strain to spread very rapidly into the entire population - not only hiv-infected or/and TB co-infected people are dying from this, but also previously perfectly healthy people now get it from their own home environments. XDR-TB has escaped from its previous TB-hospital setting and entered the general population, TB-experts are warning in the Western Cape area, where the fifth patient has just died.
 
My contacts in SA inform me that XDR-TB is also terrifying the population at large mainly because the SA authorities send out such confusing signals: terrified 'ordinary TB" patients and nursing staff even fled from hospitals as soon as XDR-TB patients arrived; and in some provinces such as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, XDR-TB patients are increasingly sent home for "treatment" because there aren't enough hospitals beds to accommodate them all. This particular strain called SA-1 is a mutation with the hiv-virus and the TB-bacillus and has a 100% mortaility rate in South Africa.
 
I am personally aghast at this very rapid spread of this epidemic in SA-- this was the country's fourth outbreak since 2003. The previous ones all were contained -- but this one, first identified in October 2006 in Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal, has entered the main- stream population.
 
The first outbreaks in the Western Cape in 2003 and 2004 of this particular HIV/TB mutant strain were contained because that particular province's health department acted with strong urgency and using the best scientific methods, even tracing down Patient Zero's contacts all the way to Zambia and finding others in Zimbabwe...
 
Due to the rather odd lack of recent publicity about this from the South African health department itself since April 2007 -- I also wonder whether the UK and indeed the European health authorities are even aware of this very real infection danger of XDR-TB posed for travellers to and from South Africa?
 
XDR-TB much more dangerous and infectious than bird-flu... so why this media silence of about the fact that XDR-TB is now taking on epidemic proportions in South Africa?
Authorities like yourselves cannot rely on the SA health authorities to provide you with the latest, truthful facts: after all, the SA authorities also failed to report the first two outbreaks of this particularly virulent XDR-TB strain (SA1 strain) in 2003 and 2004 to the World Health Organisation and to the Centres for Disease Control - even though it was contained, it should also have been reported as a completely new strain.
The last official health department SA news release about this epidemic was in April 2007 and there has been a deafening silence ever since -- however my own very excellent medical contacts in South Africa warn that things are going rather badly out of control now, and that local clinics and hospitals especially in KwaZulu Natal, but also in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng provinces, now either follow their own science-ruled guidelines or are trying to make sense of the rather confusing government guidelines which won't let them isolate any of the diagnosed XDR-TB patients if they refuse treatment and also place severe financial constraints on their use of the correct medicines.
 
In Europe, are there adequate TB-prevention controls in place at all our ports of entry, for instance, or are just 10% of the southern-African travellers being 'checked for TB-infections' as was still the case a year ago? And are the travellers to South Africa -- the World Cup 2010 with its 350,000 soccer fans to that country springs readily to mind -- being warned about this XDR-TB outbreak -- and do they now about the fact that even healthy people (not just hiv-infected people as is being claimed by the SA health authorities) can be infected with this quite easily by carriers who just have to cough the bacillae into the atmosphere around them?
 
I know of at least three perfectly healthy people -- one a baby and am 18-year-old youth in the Western Cape who both died at home and; a 41-year old Afrikaner woman who died of XDR-TB at a private clinic in Klerksdorp, North West province; in other words these three people were infected by unknown carriers inside their own environment, both were NOT hiv-positive, had never been treated for TB before and also had no other immune-deficiencies.
 
None of the available antibiotics had any effect on their condition and they died very quickly, in fact hospitals in the Eastern Cape are now warning that the second-line drugs being tried on XDR-TB patients there are having 'very toxic side-effects".
 
It's worrying that TB-Alert is not ringing the alarm bells about this in all the UK news media?
 
Yours sincerely
 
Adriana Stuijt
Retired Medical Journalist 
Formerly Of The Johannesburg Sunday Times


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