Treatment Action Campaign, Section 27, and Médecins Sans Frontières are calling for civil society, which forced the government in 2002 to give antiretrovirals to HIV positive pregnant women, to now turn their attention to TB. They are using the TB conference, which kicks off in Durban today, to raise the plight of the thousands of people who die of drug-resistant TB every year, because there is no medicine that works to cure them. They also suggest that government set up war rooms in every province to improve treatment of TB as more than half the people who are diagnosed with drug resistant TB in the government don’t even start treatment. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise in South Africa and has a cure rate of less than 40%. South Africa has the third highest number of drug resistant TB patients in the world. “We have the policies and documents on how to treat TB, but what is missing is political will,” said Section 27 Attorney John Stevens He said prisoners with TB are not being treated properly in prison, despite a 2012 Constitutional Court ruling that held the Department of Justice liable for a prisoner contracting TB in overcrowded Pollsmoor.

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