Despite being considered as a disease of the past, tuberculosis (TB) kills seven people in Europe every hour and, worryingly, rates of multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) in the region are the highest in the world. With 81,000 MDR-TB cases in 2010 alone, the European region accounts for nearly 20 % of the global burden. […]
Tag: TB
Rebecca Coombes: Soaring rents but Ghana gets it right on vaccinations
It’s boom time in Ghana right now. The country’s economy soared by 14% in 2011 thanks to new oil receipts—earning it a listing as the world’s fastest growing economy. This prosperity is a mixed blessing say the locals. Rents in the capital city Accra are approaching London levels—$2000 a month for an apartment in a […]
Grania Brigden: Time to make TB the enemy that can’t hide
As the Kony 2012 campaign continues to sear the image of Joseph Kony—head of the Ugandan guerilla group, the Lord’s Resistance Army— into the world’s consciousness, it’s worth remembering that there is another, more deadly killer at loose on the African continent. This killer is tuberculosis. The two have much in common. They have no […]
Research highlights – 7 October 2011
“Research highlights” is a weekly round-up of research papers appearing in the print BMJ. We start off with this week’s research questions, before providing more detail on some individual research papers and accompanying articles. […]
Richard Smith: Managing hypertension in a South African township
South Africa suffers from a “quadruple burden” of disease—infectious disease, particularly AIDS and TB; trauma from road traffic injuries and violence; perinatal and maternal health problems; and non-communicable disease. I thought of this burden as we visited the community clinic in Khayelitsha, the largest “township” in Cape Town. […]
Richard Smith on countering the “wicked problem” of the chronic disease pandemic
I spent two days last week in the seductive grandeur of Trinity College, Oxford, fretting about the global pandemic of chronic disease, but I left feeling optimistic—despite the pandemic raging as fiercely as ever. […]
Philipp du Cros dreams of a rapid point of care test for tuberculosis
In my work with Médecins Sans Frontières I constantly face dilemmas when trying to decide whether a patient has tuberculosis or not. In the countries where we work, diagnosis for tuberculosis still relies on the use of sputum microscopy, a test developed over 100 years ago, that will detect only 45-65% of cases when performed […]
Richard Feinmann on volunteering after retirement
What to do when you are a sexagenarian physician who has retired from hospital practice with 40 years in the NHS under your belt and golf/Sudoku not really appealing? Well, my health visitor wife and I applied to Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and I am writing this from a hospital in Kampala, Uganda, where I have […]