Lusaka, March 27 (NNN-ZANIS) The Southern Africa HIV and AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) says it is impossible and impractical for African countries to believe that they can eradicate or even halve TB infections by 2015.

SAfAIDS Executive Director Lois Chingandu says African countries will continue to see the growth of the phenomenon of drug-resistant strains of TB unless the countries begin to implement global and national strategies to contribute to meaningful and worthwhile poverty reduction programmes.

Revealing that Africa currently accounted for 10 per cent of all new TB infections and bore the heaviest costs for treatment, she added that the recent emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely drug-resistant (XDR) strains of TB in East Africa and South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal province respectively, should remind African countries that current tools used in controlling and monitoring TB and its co-infection process with HIV were inadequate to address the severity of the epidemics.

Chingandu's statement is contained in a press release made available to ZANIS by the Media Resources Desk in Harare.

In calling for a scientific progress in the field of this research, and not mere knowledge acquisition, she said progress needed to come through testing interventions that would help in diagnosing and treating the drug resistance.

She also stressed on the need for progress in carrying out large-scale and extensive research into TB drug resistance throughout the world, as has been conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and in South Africa.

She explained that while lesser studies into TB drug resistance had been conducted in Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia, samples used were relatively small partly because of the lack of laboratory capacity in these resource-limited areas.

She pointed out that before Africa could hope to roll out treatment in the region, the continent had to first gauge its nations’ capacity to diagnose those in need of it.

She said there was need to produce assessment reports to support TB programmes just as there was support in assessing the capacity of laboratories in the region to support the scaling up towards universal access to HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support services.

She also called for continued advocacy calls for TB vaccine research and trials while developing treatment that will work harmoniously with anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) in the light of the linkages between TB and HIV infection.

Chingandu pointed out that while there is good understanding among policy makers of these linkages, there is still limited integration of the two services, and weakened co-ordination between HIV and TB responses at operational level saying the service providers, who have the responsibility to make the integration possible, either lacked the knowledge about the linkages or had insufficient training in dealing with TB and HIV co-infection.

She called on policy makers to invest in extensive training of service providers, to operationalize the integration of services, and strengthen the co-ordination of TB and HIV and AIDS responses at all levels.

For the future, Chingandu envisaged a one-stop service for integrated TB and HIV testing which would further cut on spending of already limited resources for the many who are co-infected with TB and HIV.