By: Aphelele Buqwana For more than two decades, Patricia Bond cared for other people as a professional nurse. But in 2010, the healthcare worker found herself on the other side of the hospital bed, fighting for her own life after being diagnosed with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). Bond had been working in the Kidney and Dialysis Unit in Claremont, Cape Town, since 2008 when she first became ill in September 2010. At first, she was diagnosed with pneumonia and treated with antibiotics, but the treatment did not bring the improvement she expected. “I was on antibiotic treatment, but my cough and malaise continued,” […]

By: Rene Sparks and Aphelele Buqwana Neal Anthony Stacey had always seen optimism as a way of looking at life, but his experience with TB changed the way he understood suffering, illness and the people behind the disease. As he met more people through the years, particularly after becoming involved in TB awareness, he began to understand how differently people experience the TB disease. “All of us had our own suffering,” he says. “Hard is hard, but there isn’t harder or less hard with TB.” For Stacey, that understanding came from experience. A fit and active sportsman, he never imagined […]