Stanley Kwenda
3 March 2009
Harare — Zimbabwe's crumbling health system makes it almost impossible to detect and treat tuberculosis (TB), doctors say. As a result, they suspect the country has large numbers of unidentified cases of multi-drug resistant (MDR) as well as extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB.
International humanitarian relief organisation, Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF), said Zimbabwe has the public health system of a country at war.
"It's like being asked to have a fist fight in the dark because you don't know what you are treating," said Dr Clemence Duri, head of the Harare city council's two infectious disease hospitals, Beatrice and Wilkins. He says the number of MDR and XDR cases in Zimbabwe is unknown because proper patient health records and statistics are not being kept.
"The truth is that we don't know the extent of the MDR TB, but it is likely that it is high, and it is also likely that we have many cases of XDR TB," Duri told IPS. "Most of the TB patients we see at the hospital have been infected at least twice."
A shortage of financial resources and health workers further exacerbates the situation. Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights (ZDHR) estimates 100,000 health professionals have left the country within the last nine years. To make matters worse, many nurses and doctors who have remained in the country are not working, as the strike over pay for health workers that began in August last year is still unresolved.
Many hospitals and clinics have had to close down, as a result, while those still in operation have little medicine available. "Right now, we are poorly resourced. Even if we want to carry out studies, we have no capacity, no computers or even test kits. We have nothing," Duri explained.
There is also a shortage of drugs to treat TB. As a result, government hospitals have started to refer patients to rural mission hospitals financially supported by international aid organisations.
According to 2007 health department statistics, the country's TB case detection rate is only 42 percent, a figure falling far short of the World Health Organisation (WHO) target of detecting 70 percent of TB infections. In addition, Zimbabwe's official treatment success rate is 68 percent, 17 percent lower than the WHO target of 85 percent.
HIV and TB
Someone in the world is newly infected with tuberculosis (TB) bacilli every second; overall, one-third of the world's population is currently infected with the TB bacillus.
TB is spread through the air when infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they propel TB germs, known as bacilli, into the air. A person needs only to inhale a small number of these to be infected.
Left untreated, each person with active TB disease will infect on average between 10 and 15 people every year. But people infected with TB bacilli will not necessarily become sick with the disease. The immune system "walls off" the TB bacilli which, protected by a thick waxy coat, can lie dormant for years.
HIV and TB form a lethal combination, each speeding the other's progress. HIV weakens the immune system; someone who is HIV-positive and infected with TB bacilli is many times more likely to become sick with TB.
TB is a leading cause of death among people who are HIV-positive. In Africa, HIV is the single most important factor contributing to the increase in incidence of TB since 1990.
Information adapted from WHO
To get the disease under control in the midst of a poorly functioning primary health care infrastructure, doctors have called on the national health department to swiftly implement TB awareness and education programmes. To reach as many people as possible, this needs to involve community members and take place within communities, Duri suggested.
National TB coordinator, Dr Charles Sandy, admitted at a recent National TB Capacity Building and Policy Dialogue Platform conference in Harare that a MDR-TB outbreak could soon surprise Zimbabwe. "The chances that TB is spreading fast in our population is high," he said.
Anecdotal evidence points to significant drug-resistance problems, Sandy explained: "We have cases of MDR and XDR TB for sure, but we have a challenge because our TB reference laboratory, which is supposed to diagnose the tests, is not (functioning)."
Sandy was referring to the country's only TB testing lab at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare - the country's only laboratory that can carry out bacterial culture and drug sensitivity tests - which is currently dysfunctional because of outdated and broken diagnostic equipment.
Theoretically, TB can be diagnosed relatively easily through sputum smear tests that are then analysed in a laboratory. But with limited testing services available, many TB cases either go undiagnosed or are treated without accurate diagnosis. As a result, TB treatment in Zimbabwe currently relies on a doctor's ability to recognise the disease based on symptoms, or on guesswork.
The Zimbabwean health department has blamed international sanctions for its inability to receive donor money that could help to purchase much-needed modern medical equipment. This although Zimbabwe has received a $12 million grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
A nurse at Beatrice Infectious Diseases Hospital, who did not want to be named, told IPS that a Detect-TB research study funded by the UK-based Welfare Trust, which had been commenced last year in collaboration with the Biomedical Research Institute in London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has been suspended because of the outbreak of the cholera epidemic, which took up all of hospitals' capacity.
Since August last year, more than 3,500 Zimbabweans have died of cholera, according to the United Nations.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2009 Inter Press Service. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
The country's security system should be extra vigilant especially around the hospitals to ward off external forces that could plant various viruses in the country. TB an HIV viruses could be spread in the country by external destabilization forces.
OK. Let us have it, AllAfrica.
Now and then, whenever you show a picture of the starving and dying Zimbabweans, there is a well-fed, healthy white woman sitting close by.
USA, UK, EU (and indeed the white race) imposed economic sanctions on Zimbabwe which resulted in human catastrophe that is unfolding - destitution, rampant pestilence, starvation and death. The whites did it.
So,
1) There are many more local native nurses attending to the starving, the sick and the dying in Zimbabwe than there are foreigners. Chances are, you would see thousands of native nurses and doctors in Zimbabwe's health care system before you see a white one. Why is it that AllAfrica sees only whites caring for the sick in Zimbabwe?
0) Those white "nurses" you chose for your pictures look well-fed - even as they look at the malnourished Zimbabwe kids that have starved by the whites. Evil? Are they admiring the handiwork of their kith and kin? [I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are the ultra-racist rhodies commenting here ..]
1) Are we supposed to think that native Zimbabweans to do care for their sick, starving and the dying? And that AllAfrica cannot find a single native for their photos?
2) Is AllAfrica trying to give us the impression that the feral whites - who invaded Africa and for centuries unleashed suffering and death on the African - are kindhearted and caring? Is AllAfrica into psychological warfare here?
[Of course they are. Read the thrust of the stuff their stuff writes about. And look at the list of papers in Africa, and articles about Africa, that are not carried by AllAfrica. For instance, why is the spotlight on the gossip emanating from SW Radio in London?]
Is AllAfrica trying to cover up the sins of the whites whose deliberate actions precipitated the starvation, sickness and death in Zimbabwe - just as they did in Iraq before they invaded it to rape, torture and kill the innocent - and commandeer their resources?
Come to think of it, we don't see the faces of the white "nurses". What expression do they have? Satisfaction for a job well done? That of a cat that plays with the mouse before it devours it?
OR, Are those pictures meant for the consumption of whites - to make the whites (especially the colonial british) proud that they are in firm control of the white man's imperial empire in Africa - unleashing pestilences, impoverishing the natives, commandeering the resources - all for the her majesty?
AllAfrica, are there any native African nurses and doctors in Zimbabwe? Are they too ugly to show on your website? Or don't you want us to get an impression that the native can take care of business in Zimbabwe? Or are you trying to rehabilitate the image of evil whites in the eyes of the world - and themselves?
[And that is a tall order indeed.]
----
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/03/03/diplomatic-hiccup/
Thats hilarious. There arent any pictures on this site, just article. You post that piece of copy and paste crap every few weeks here and its laughable. Just like when you said that nearly 1 million children were raped in the UK last year. Seriously, there is a nursing home missing a patient here...
I really wonder how people at the top feel when u lose your loved ones in zim through illnesses that can be controled like diabetes etc. bse someone is not doing their job properly