Professor McShane says: ‘Without the community’s involvement, we simply couldn’t test these vaccines. Participating families are found and recruited by local volunteers. The most recently completed involved some 3,000 babies in and around the Worcester township. The partnership is now on their fifth trial together. With other partners, including non-profit development partner and co-funder Aeras, they have built a system of trialling vaccines, based at SATVI’s unit in Worcester and with the active participation of the local community. Professor Helen McShane, of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford, has been working with SATVI since 2005. It does not guarantee lifetime protection and is not effective against the major form of pulmonary TB in adults who transmit the disease. The most commonly-used TB vaccine, BCG, has been around since 1921, and has limits. They can’t work, they lose their jobs – it’s what makes TB a social ill as well as a physical one.’Īssociate Professor Hatherill is Director of the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative at UCT, the largest dedicated TB vaccine research group on the African continent. While mortality is lower when not associated with HIV and when patients access treatment early, people are still sick for a long time. According to Mark Hatherill, associate professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT): ‘In Worcester, every family knows someone - a relative, a neighbour, a friend - who has or has had TB. Across South Africa as a whole, HIV is now a complicating factor in some 62 per cent of TB cases. The arrival of HIV, now affecting one person in ten, has escalated the problem. TB had always been a presence for the Worcester community. ">Video of Fighting TB – South Africa’s ‘insidious epidemic’
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