In a shocking revelation, it has been confirmed that there is a lot to be done at KwaZulu-Natal’s biggest government-funded tuberculosis hospitals which as of now are grappling with TB. It has been claimed at Durban’s International Convention Centre yesterday that there is worrying rise in the number of TB cases with as much as 12% of staff tested at such hospitals dealing with the disease.

“We have always known that health-care workers were at risk of infection, but until now this baseline assessment was never available. We’ve got the policies, but they’re not being used”, said Martie van der Walt, the interim director of the Tuberculosis Epidemiology and Intervention Research Unit at the Medical Research Council in Pretoria, who was present at the third TB conference.

It was also told that unavailability of occupational health officers in such hospitals is the main reason of the situation going this bad. It has further been told that though two hospitals do have full-time nurses for the same, they don’t have the authority to save health-care workers in their hospitals.

It’s indeed worrying that the situation in hospitals is getting so bad and nothing much is being done for the same. There is need to improve the current standard of occupational health and safety needs so that things can improve for health care workers in the time to come.