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: Aphelele Buqwana In the Eastern Cape, the fight against TB does not end when someone walks into a clinic. Finding people with the disease, getting them onto treatment and supporting them to complete it are all part of a longer care journey, with people at risk of being lost at each stage. For the province’s TB Caucus, understanding these gaps is becoming an important part of its role in overseeing the TB response. These issues were at the centre of a Basic TB Management Training Programme hosted by the Eastern Cape Department of Health, Eastern Cape Legislature and Eastern […]

By: Rene Sparks Forty TB Champions gathered at Isivivana Centre in Khayelitsha on 11 and 18 September 2026 for training on the TB Advocacy Toolkit, bringing practical community experience into discussions about how to strengthen TB advocacy. The TB Champions, supported by TB Proof, work across four health facilities in the Khayelitsha Sub District. Their engagement during the sessions went beyond learning about advocacy tools, with participants sharing ideas on how they could reach more people in their communities and support health facilities to improve TB testing. A key concern raised was the need to reach more men. Participants discussed […]