7th SA TB conference galvanised scientists and community to get TB response back on track

3 October 2022

CAPRISA’s Professor Kogie Naidoo, Deputy Director (left in the photo), and Head of Treatment Research delivered a plenary titled: “State of the art: New TB regimen for Treatment and Prevention”, at the opening session of the 7th SA TB conference attended by local and global scientists and community representatives. “We have an estimated 300 000 cases of TB and 61 000 deaths in South Africa each year,” said Naidoo. “South Africa is one of 30 high-burden TB countries, and these countries account for 86% of the estimated new TB cases worldwide.”

The conference themed ‘working together to get TB control back on track’, held from 14th – 16th September in Durban highlighted the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on increasing TB associated mortality while reducing TB case finding, treatment and prevention. Presentations covered diverse topics in TB prevention and treatment, drugs vaccines and diagnosis, breaking down barriers to achieving HIV, TB and STIs solutions and social and community aspects of TB.

Also, on the first day of the conference CAPRISA’s PhD Research Fellow Ms Thando Maseko (bottom left in the photo), supervised by Dr Aida Sivro CAPRISA Senior Scientist won a best oral abstract award for her oral presentation, ‘Changes in natural killer cell phenotypes in TB/HIV co-infection’ and Ms Senamile Ngema (bottom right in the photo), PhD Research Fellow supervised by Prof Naidoo presented a poster, ‘Isoniazid resistance-conferring mutations are associated with highly variable phenotypic resistance’.

On 15th September Naidoo was a panellist in the session, TB Host Response: Options for Uptake and Patient Care and CAPRISA’s honorary Senior Scientist, Dr Halima Dawood gave a talk in a satellite session on the ‘Implementation of Urine TB-LAM – Experience sharing from an Academic Hospital, KZN’.