South Africa and the fight against TB
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 But since early 2025, streams of that money have been withdrawn due to a series of decisions by the Trump administration.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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.5 | I can say, |
| 0:09.5 | 14, 15, 10, so I'm not proud. |
| 0:13.6 | This black box here is our coffer room. |
| 0:16.3 | This is part of the clinical trial you're running here. |
| 0:18.5 | Yes, yes. |
| 0:19.3 | Let me see, show you how it looks. Looks like a garden shed. Yes, it is. It is a garden shed. It is something that we... Garden shed play a unique role in science. The garden shed door has two panels of soundproofing on it. Yes. And a chair in the middle. And two plastic holes, you put your hand. |
| 0:43.5 | Like sometimes we use that for coughing and then we use to take the patient and spilt them through there. |
| 0:48.1 | The Wright brothers tinkered with airplane parts in a shed in North Carolina. |
| 0:52.6 | The computing company Hewlett-Packard emerged from a shed in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:55.9 | 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 the patient |
| 1:02.9 | cough, and then it records, and then it gets sent to the people that do the things with a coughing. |
| 1:10.1 | The engineers, the engineers. |
| 1:12.3 | And in the courtyard of a busy health center in a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa, |
| 1:18.7 | this garden shed is serving a very specific purpose. |
| 1:22.3 | So we, they're in the process of creating an app to see our positive cough sound and our negative cough sound. |
| 1:30.3 | What they're listening for are signs of tuberculosis, |
| 1:33.6 | a contagious airborne disease which primarily attacks the lungs. |
| 1:37.9 | It's a screening tool. |
| 1:39.5 | So at the gate you would say, please cough, what is your symptoms, cough? |
| 1:45.8 | And if they cough, the instrument will tell the patient is eligible to go for TB testing or the patient should go for further, |
| 1:52.1 | not TB, but maybe inside to the sister for consultation. Dandeline Sylvester is a community |
... |
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