Today we have the winning entry from our student journalism competition. The piece was written by Anna Gerrard Hughes from Manchester university. We selected Anna’s piece out of the hundreds of entries due to its engaging tone, innovative style and advocacy potential. Anna will be joining RESULTS on a parliamentary delegation to South Africa to learn about TB/HIV co-infection and to report on her findings whilst in country.

Anna is the fifth year of a medical degree, currently taking a year out to do a masters at Manchester University in Humanitarianism and Conflict Response. Her interest in Global Health was part of the decision to do medicine in the first place, and she has kept a language up through her degree for this very reason. Her ultimate dream would be to do some international work in global health – perhaps emergency response – and write in a journalistic form about health and all its complications alongside practising as a doctor.

We need imagination in medicine

Image courtesy of Surface Forces under a CC Licence

In Edendale hospital, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa – just a stone’s throw away from where Nelson Mandela made his last, rousing speech before imprisonment – they are fighting a new and different battle against an ever-evolving, terrifying enemy: TB.

Recently, TB has been on the decline, with scientists and physicians alike allowing themselves to imagine a world without it, but with the unprecedented explosion in cases of HIV, particularly in areas such as KwaZulu Natal, TB has returned with a vengeance.

This escalation is all the more worrying because with it comes new killers – multi drug-resistant and extensively drug resistant TB – that have caused the debilitating illness to leap back into the international arena. Suddenly, an illness which was curable by a long, yet simple course of relatively cheap medications becomes one with very limited and expensive medical options, simply because people were not taking the right medications for the right amount of time.

TB and HIV are often partnered together. Both devastating illnesses, HIV has the ability to reduce your body’s own defences, giving TB more of a chance to take hold. TB starts with a terrible cough – sometimes blood-filled – and night-sweats so bad that sufferers complain of completely drenching the sheets. If left untreated, the cough can worsen to the point where moving is too much effort for already laboured breathing, and if oxygen and drugs are not available, many patients are physically unable to cope with this for very long.

The chance of travelling this horrific, and relatively long, road to death is increased if the patient is co-infected with HIV, and increased if their access to medicine and enough food to strengthen their struggling bodies is hampered. Unfortunately, this is the case in many areas around the world.

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