- 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:
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- "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.
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- 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?"
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- 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?
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- Yours sincerely
-
- Adriana Stuijt
- Retired Medical Journalist
- Formerly Of The Johannesburg Sunday Times
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