Children suffer the consequences of poor TB infection control
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Lindo, a little girl living in the Kingdom of Swaziland, has had to endure daily injections of the MDR-TB treatment drug for the past four months and will continue to do so for a further two to four months.
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She has a smile so sweet, your heart can't help but connect on the warmest level with this little girl. From her sparkling disposition, on a casual encounter, you would never believe what she has been through in her short life span of six years.
One finds it hard to believe that there was a time when Lindokuhle Mamba never used to smile because she was in constant pain. Young as she is, she has come close to death in the hands of one of the deadliest diseases, tuberculosis (TB).
Not only does Lindokuhle have TB, but she suffers from multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB which, simply put, means she has a strain of the TB bacteria that is resistant to a number of treatment drugs. This makes the disease that much harder to treat. It is even more difficult for a young child to swallow four to seven tablets twice a day, for a long period of time.
Lindo, as she is affectionately known to her loving grandmother, mother and fellow MDR-TB patients, has had to endure daily injections of the MDR-TB treatment drug for the past four months and will, probably, continue to do so for a further two to four months. That will not be the end, though, because she will still have to continue taking many secondline TB tablets for a total period of roughly 18 months to two years.
By the time Lindo was three years old, she had developed a constant cough and breathing problems. She looked so tiny and was so weak that she could not even walk, like other children her age. Lindo's mother, who worked in a dairy farm just outside Nhlangano town in the Shiselweni Region of Swaziland, had taken her daughter to different private doctors and pharmacists, but nothing had helped, as she would appear to get better for a short while, before the throwing up and diarrhoea started all over again.
When Lindo and her mother visited Lindo's grandmother, Thab'sile Macu, at Machobeni in Shiselweni, close to the border with South Africa's KwaZulu Natal province, the grandmother was very concerned about the child's health.
