Four things you need to know about TB this TB Awareness Month
FOURWAYS GARDENS – As the world marks TB Awareness Month in March, Lawrence Mlotshwa of Witkoppen Clinic explains the illness to the Fourways Review.
TB suffer from.
What are the symptoms?
Mlotshwa explained that he and his colleagues have been trained to look out for four main identifying symptoms of the illness:
• Coughing for two weeks, or for any duration if you have a compromised immune system (such as someone with HIV)
• An unexplained loss of weight.
• A persistent fever that you’ve had for over two weeks and cannot explain
• Sweating, especially at night
“Other related symptoms to watch out for are a loss of appetite, weakness and fatigue. At the clinic, we routinely screen for TB and we’ll ask questions about these four symptoms. We then take a specimen sample from the patient [of sputum, basically a mixture of spit and mucus coughed up by the patient into a specimen jar] and send it to the lab, where they’ll test it for the presence of the bacteria.”
Photo: Robyn Kirk
Witkoppen Clinic has a special section on site, closed off and with hygiene facilities named Bekezela, where patients being screened can safely provide a sputum sample without risking the infection of others. Once the sample is donated, a TB assistant will label the sample with the patient’s information and send it through to the lab for testing.
How is TB treated?
“Here at Witkoppen Clinic, we treat patients holistically, so the treatment for TB would be different for, say, someone who is also HIV positive or other health issues,” Mlotshwa explained. “We treat TB with medication and the regiment has two phases. The intensive phase lasts for two months and we give them medication with four agents to fight off the bacteria. Then it’s the continuation phase, where we continue to treat the patient with two agents for between three to six months.”
The doses for each patient is based on their weight and it is vitally important to finish your course of treatment even if you start to feel better after only a few months. “We strictly advise patients that they mustn’t stop early, as, if they are not completely cured, the TB will come back stronger, which is how you end up with drug-resistant TB.”
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