This comes after the provincial health department confirmed that several Cape Flats health facilities had reported a rise in TB cases along with more patients defaulting on treatment.
Cape Town - While there was a 30% drop in tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in the first five months of the Covid-19, the rate of diagnosis is said to have now returned to pre-pandemic levels.
This comes after the provincial health department confirmed that several Cape Flats health facilities had reported a rise in TB cases along with more patients defaulting on treatment.
TB HIV Care communications manager Alison Best, said the patterns reflected what they had seen in their own programmes, as well as the number of people being diagnosed with TB through TB HIV Care supported services, dropping from 3091 over that three month period in 2019, to 1858 in the same period in 2020, and then recovering to former levels to 3 960 by that period in 2021.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on TB services around the world and on the trajectory of the TB epidemic as a whole. This occurred due to a number of factors including the interruption to health services, for example when clinics needed to suspend or redirect services to enable decontamination when a Covid-19 case was detected, or when staffing and resources had to be redirected to the Covid-19 response.
“The movement restrictions during lockdown and clients’ fears of becoming infected with Covid-19 when visiting a clinic, which led to fewer people seeking out health care. Since someone on effective TB treatment is not infectious to others, a drop in diagnosis is likely to lead to fewer people being on treatment and therefore more TB disease circulating in a community or household,” said Best.
The organisation said that the Western Cape had adopted a proactive, collaborative approach to dealing with these challenges and in April 2021, a multi-sectoral emergency response plan to reduce the spread of TB was launched.
This plan recognised TB as a public health crisis requiring urgent response. The plan aimed to bring together government, funders, civil society and communities to create a common purpose and implement many innovative interventions such as digital chest X-rays and targeted universal TB testing, along with TB preventive therapy.
Provincial Health Department spokesperson Byron la Hoe, said that due to the National Covid-19 lockdown restrictions the amount of TB clients lost to follow-up (LTFU) had declined, and for February 2022 leading up to World TB Day on March 24, the Department’s Klipfontein and Mitchells Plain substructure were embarking on an active LTFU tracing plan, as well as case finding in Mitchells Plain and the surrounding areas.
“To take action, the substructure will be encouraging these communities to re-invest in their lives and take their health back by taking aggressive action to have TB patients, who did not start treatment or whose treatment was interrupted for two consecutive months or more, return to care in the next 30 days. The substructure will also conduct home-based care and visits, and conduct follow-up return to care calls to the client,” said La Hoe.
Best added that TB HIV Care was working with the Department of Health (DoH) and other NGOs to implement the plan.
“As part of the emergency response plan, we are providing digital chest X-rays through customised containers and more recently, through a mobile van. This will enable us to take digital chest X-rays (a technique which is highly effective at identifying people with TB, especially those without symptoms) into communities, particularly those that data from health facilities tells us are most affected.”
“In addition to this we are working with the DoH to roll out TB preventive therapy and to support the tracing of household contacts of anyone diagnosed with TB. We are pleased to announce that we have also received renewed support for our TB Programme in the Cape Metro from the National Department of Health through funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria up until 2025,” said Best.
Weekend Argus