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Mining Weekly reports that the SA mining industry has made significant inroads into addressing tuberculosis (TB) since 2017 and has met its ten-year target to reduce the incidence rate among mineworkers to below national levels.
In 2014, the Mine Health and Safety Council set the milestone of achieving a TB incidence rate for the sector of below the national average by 2024. In 2015, the mining industry’s TB incidence rate was more than 1,060 per 100,000 employees, according to the Minerals Council SA (MCSA – previously known as the Chamber of Mines – compared with a national average of 834 per 100 000 people. By 2022, the latest year for which the MCSA has verified data, the incidence rate in the mining sector was 278 per 100,000, well below the 537 per 100,000 national rate. “The mining industry’s biggest achievement in healthcare was reaching the TB incidence rate in 2017 and sustainably keeping it well below the national level every year since then,” MCSA health head Dr Thuthula Balfour pointed out. At the peak of the TB epidemic in the early 2000s, incidence rates in the mining industry were about seven times the rates in the general population. TB is an infectious bacterial disease that generally affects the lungs. March 24 was World TB Day.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard at Mining Weekly
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