The following joint -statement was released today by the Treatment Action Campaign and the TB/HIV Care Association. A copy of the statement was handed over to Dr. Joey Cupido who received the memo on behalf of the National Department of Health following a march to Parliament.

World TB Day Memorandum - A Call to Action

24 March, 2009

Work in partnership to save lives: Increase access to TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment and adherence support

We, as nongovernmental organisations, health workers and community care givers working to prevent and treat TB in our communities, are here today to show our commitment to increase our efforts and build partnerhips to end the TB and HIV coepidemics. We realise that we cannot overcome this immense public health challenge alone and that commitment is needed from every individual, organisation and sector. As civil society, we will continue to mobilise communities and collaborate with government to increase access to TB/HIV services. In turn, we call on government to commit to invest more financial and human resources to address the dual TB and HIV epidemics in South Africa in partnership with civil society.

The combination of antiretroviral (ARV) and tuberculosis (TB) treatments could more than halve the mortality rate among patients coinfected with HIV and TB, according to a randomised open-label trial by the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). 

The AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA), the Treatment Action Campaign, the AIDS Law Project, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa and the HIV Collaborative Fund call on the Government of Botswana to urgently grant access to treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) patient Mthandazo Sibanda, who is being held in a maximum-security prison clinic in Gaborone pending his deportation to Zimbabwe. The grounds for deportation are his TB status and self-interruption of treatment in June, following months of mismanagement in the health care system.

The group of eminent health and human rights experts write, "On the 3rd of July at the South African National Tuberculosis (TB) Conference in Durban, Mr. Thami Mseleku, Director General of the Department of Health, stated publicly that: “human rights are not relevant to the considerations of health policy in a developmental state”. As international health and human rights experts, we are extremely disturbed that someone holding such a central post with responsibility for health in South Africa would express such sentiment and display such a fundamental misunderstanding about human rights as a critical foundation of the health response in developing countries."

The AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA) issued a report today on tuberculosis (TB), the mining industry and migrant workers in the region, which raises urgent concerns about the failure of the South African government and mining companies to adequately address the health crisis among migrant workers in the South African mining sector.

Policy and Programmatic Interventions for the Cross-Border Control of Tuberculosis between Lesotho and South Africa, Focusing on Miners, Ex-Miners and Their Families

-A Policy Paper by the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA)

THE MINING SECTOR, TUBERCULOSIS AND MIGRANT LABOUR IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Policy and Programmatic Interventions for the Cross-Border Control of Tuberculosis between Lesotho and South Africa, Focusing on Miners, Ex-Miners and Their Families

- a policy paper by the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA)

The AIDS Law Project (ALP) and Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) condemn the attacks on Mark Heywood by the Department of Health Director General, Thami Mseleku and the national DOH TB cluster manager, David Mametja.

Mseleku, speaking from the floor after a plenary presentation by Heywood, made a personal attack on the presentation, claiming that Heywood had merely swapped his slides from HIV to TB, and that ‘human rights were not relevant to considerations of health policy in a developmental state’.

TAC has released two key position papers on TB.

"How does a preventable, curable disease become the leading cause of all natural deaths in SA, and the leading cause of all AIDS-related mortalities on our continent? Well, first we take drug-sensitive TB, a perfectly curable form of tuberculosis, and mismanage it for decades in health structures with poor infection control, weak diagnostic capacity, insufficient education on TB, inadequate resources and minimal political commitment. We observe substandard cure rates and increasing mortality figures. Over time, our poorly functioning TB programmes are manufacturing drug-resistant TB strains — the result of inadequate or incomplete TB treatment — but we don't worry about this too much until multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB explodes in our faces." -- Paula Akugizibwe, AIDS & Rights Alliance for Southern Africa