'Do Not Cup Your Mouth In your Hand(s) When You Cough'

GALE NGAKANE
Correspondent | Monday June 22, 2009 00:00

But how many people know that cupping one's hands when one is coughing is also an unhelpful practice?

This emerged at a two-day BOTUSA and Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) workshop in Francistown last week where an expert said Botswana was one of the countries with the highest incidences of tuberculosis.

Dr Sambayawo Nyirenda, who was presenting a paper titled 'Links Between TB and HIV: Update on BOTUSA TB Prevention Research, shocked participants when she said instead of cupping their hands when they cough, people should use a cloth, or the lapel of their shirt or jacket.

'This is because the disease is airborne and highly infectious, hence using cupped hands when coughing would not be helpful,' Nyirenda said.

She revealed that by 2002, Botswana had the highest TB incidence rate in southern Africa - 623 per 100,000 according to statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Thankfully, 2007 statistics showed the rate to have gone down to 470 per 100,000.

'But 470 is still high,' Nyerenda said. Between 2002 and 2003, TB cases averaged 10,000 to 12,000 cases per year. Sixty percent to 86 percent of these numbers were HIV co-infected while 40 percent of autopsies of HIV-infected patients at a regional referral hospital like Nyangabgwe showed evidence of TB.

Yet health professionals have always maintained that TB was curable and that patients should also test for HIV and vice-versa, Nyirenda noted. They also held that even with ARVs, people living with HIV (PLWH) were at a high risk of contracting TB.

Treatment of TB is done through four drugs, Isoniazid, Rifampin, Pyrazinamide and Ethambutol and if no treatment is administered in a HIV-negative person, chances of such a person's survival are 40 to 60 percent, it emerged at the workshop.

But when the patient takes the drugs, there is a 100-percent chance of survival.

Health specialists do, however, acknowledge that there are drug-resistant strains, though there are no known cases in Botswana so far. But the experts, including Dr Nyirenda, advise that with the use of prophylaxis (IPT), there is a 60-percent chance of the risk of the disease being reduced.

However, it is the coughing protocol that the layman should be able to master because TB is an airborne disease whose bacteria zoom through the air. Therefore, though it's a great Motown hit, the advice of the Staple Singers' song to 'put on your hands on your mouth when you cough, respect yourself ...' should be discarded.