AQUITY Innovations has been appointed as a sub-recipient (SR) to the National Department of Health (NDoH) from April 2019 to March 2022 to provide TB services for the Global Fund (GF) Grant in Ehlanzeni District (Mpumalanga Province), OR Tambo District (Eastern Cape) and Buffalo City Metropolitan (BCM) Municipality (Eastern Cape). AQUITY will provide a comprehensive package of TB services in Ehlanzeni and OR Tambo districts through three (3) modules:

• The first module is the TB care and prevention module which focuses on finding the missing TB patients, linkage and retention in care and providing appropriate treatment for latent TB infection, underpinned by robust quality improvement (QI) methodology.
• The second module is MDR-TB which focuses on two aspects of community-based retention in care: (1) Pharmacovigilance in the form of active drug safety monitoring (ADSM), and (2) Adherence support through community-based differentiated care.
• Module 3 on TB/HIV focuses on ensuring that the standard of care for all those with presumptive or diagnosed TB includes rapid HTS and optimizing provision of Latent TB Infection (LTBI) treatment for eligible HIV positive people.

In Buffalo City Metropolitan (BCM) Municipality, AQUITY will implement Quality Improvement (QI) activities and provide support towards the monitoring and evaluation of the TB program.

Each year, we commemorate World Tuberculosis (TB) Day on March 24 to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of TB, and to step up efforts to end the global TB epidemic. The date marks the day in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the bacterium that causes TB, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease.

TB remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious killers. Each day, nearly 4000 lose their lives to TB and close to 28,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease. Global efforts to combat TB have saved an estimated 63 million lives since the year 2000.

The theme of World TB Day 2021 – ‘The Clock is Ticking’ – conveys the sense that the world is running out of time to act on the commitments to end TB made by global leaders. This is especially critical in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has put End TB progress at risk, and to ensure equitable access to prevention and care in line with WHO’s drive towards achieving Universal Health Coverage.

In 2019, 360 000 South Africans fell ill with TB, of those 14 000 fell ill with drug resistant TB and 209 000 people had both HIV and TB. AQUITY Innovations aims to assist the global target of diagnosing and enrolling 40 million people on TB treatment and enrolling 30 million on TB preventive therapy by 2022.