South Africa and the fight against TB

南非与抗击结核病之战

The Documentary Podcast

2026-01-06

33 分钟
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According to the Guinness Book of World Records, TB is humanity’s oldest contagious disease. It has become something of an afterthought in rich nations, but remains the world’s most deadly infectious disease. In 2024 it killed more than 1.2 million people. South Africa has one of the highest TB burdens in the world, but it has also developed one of the most sophisticated scientific ecosystems for the study of the disease. Clinical trials conducted in the country have been crucial to the innovation of TB treatments, vaccines, diagnostics and prevention strategies. Much of the funding for this research comes from American institutions. But since early 2025, streams of that money have been withdrawn due to a series of decisions by the Trump administration. Sandra Kanthal visits Cape Town and discovers the story of two intertwined landscapes: the people in local communities struggling with the burden of tuberculosis, and the scientific institutions embedded in them trying to tackle the disease - and why at the moment both are struggling. This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.
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  • This black box here is our coffee room.

  • This is part of the clinical trial you're running here.

  • Let me show you how it looks.

  • It looks like a garden shed.

  • Yes, it is.

  • It is a garden shed.

  • Garden sheds play a unique role in science.

  • The garden shed door has two panels of soundproofing on it and a chair in the middle and two plastic holes.

  • You put your Sometimes we use that

  • for coughing and then we use that to take the patient's spiltum through there.

  • The Wright brothers tinkered with airplane parts in a shed in North Carolina.

  • The computing company Hewlett Packard emerged from a shed in Silicon Valley.

  • And Mary Curie conducted radiation experiments from a converted shed in Paris.

  • And this is a mic.

  • You put the phone in here and then you, the patient coughs.

  • and then it records and then it gets sent to the people that do the things with the coffee,

  • the engineers, the engineers.

  • And in the courtyard of a busy health center in a township outside of Cape Town,

  • South Africa, this garden shed is serving a very specific purpose.

  • So we,