Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has relaunched the SA Tuberculosis Caucus, a platform for political leaders to advance the response to the disease, as the Department of Health’s End TB Campaign aims to test 5m people in 2025/26.
At Tuesday’s launch, the Minister described the caucus as a bridge between political leadership, the health sector and communities, and said it aimed to “champion” the response to the disease, reports Daily Maverick.
The SA TB Caucus was originally launched in 2018, after the establishment of the Global TB Caucus – a worldwide network of parliamentarians – in 2014.
Motsoaledi co-chaired the global group at the time it was created. However, he said the SA TB Caucus had “silently disappeared” in the intervening years.
“Today, we are reforming it and asking Members of Parliament, this time around, please don’t let it disappear.”
Tools to fight TB
Last week, the Health Department, in partnership with the National Health Laboratory Service and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, launched a public-facing dashboard providing real-time TB testing data countrywide.
The web-based platform is a tool for tracking the country’s progress towards the End TB Campaign’s goal of testing 5m people each year.
The dashboard shows that 1.76m people have been tested since April 2025, which represents 60.7% of the 2.9m testing target to date. Of those tested, about 89 000 were found to have TB.
Motsoaledi said the dashboard would help the caucus to track TB testing across age groups, genders and regions.
Acting chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Health Tembalam Xego called the relaunch a “call to action”, saying the responsibility for the fight against the disease couldn’t rest on the Health Department alone, but needed to involve every division of government, other sectors of society, and communities.
TB kills about 56 000 South Africans a year.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Shorter, simpler DR-TB regimen in the pipeline for South Africa
KZN research challenges TB transmission theories