Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen

In loving memory of Andile Madondile – a community leader who dedicated his life to raising awareness about TB & HIV. His passion lives on. Watch below to hear him speak about it. #EndTB

🆘🚨”South Africa is the beacon… We have many important collaborative works going on there…To cut them off, I just I don’t understand it. It’s self-destructive behavior.”- Dr. Harold Varmus, a professor of medicine at Cornell University, Nobel Prize in medicine
#Tuberculosis
#HIV
🧵↩️

Politics and Global Health: The Need for a New, Resilient Architecture Free online lecture with Mitchell Warren Recent, dramatic shifts in global health funding include cuts to US and UK foreign aid. This has had a cascade of devasting consequences on treatment and prev...

Invitation to a public @ox.ac.uk guest lecture on Politics and Global Health: The Need for a New, Resilient Architecture

Delivered by Mitchell Warren, director of AVAC.

Wednesday 30th April 2025, 15:30 - 16:30 UK time.
More information and sign-up link here: www.conted.ox.ac.uk/events/view/...

@trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social @tbproof.bsky.social please help share the invitation 😊

Politics and Global Health: The Need for a New, Resilient Architecture Free online lecture with Mitchell Warren Recent, dramatic shifts in global health funding include cuts to US and UK foreign aid. This has had a cascade of devasting consequences on treatment and prev...

Invitation to a public @ox.ac.uk guest lecture on Politics and Global Health: The Need for a New, Resilient Architecture

Delivered by Mitchell Warren, director of AVAC.

Wednesday 30th April 2025, 15:30 - 16:30 UK time.
More information and sign-up link here: www.conted.ox.ac.uk/events/view/...

Such a great paper! We are looking for a speaker for our symposium on new developments in TB IPC at the union conference - could this be of interest?

🔔 YO, LISTEN UP! 🔔

Did you know TB is still a thing? Yup, and it’s serious. That’s why 24 March is World TB Day—to spread awareness and step up the fight against this disease!

🔥 Wanna win R1500 cash? 🔥

Deadline: 24 March @ MIDNIGHT. One lucky winner gets the cash! 💰⏳

How a WHO Staff Member Turned the US Withdrawal into an Act of Solidarity

How a WHO Staff Member Turned the US Withdrawal into an Act of Solidarity

who.foundation/blogs-post/h...

Two wonderful global health scholars have made their global health books free to download

Bravo and thanks @seyeabimbola.bsky.social and
@thewrittenro.bsky.social

The Foreign Gaze:
www.editions.ird.fr/open_access_...

Rethinking Global Health:
taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon...

With thanks to the @rhodestrust.bsky.social for the opportunity to do this work at @ox.ac.uk, and my supervisors Chris Butler, Sarah Tonkin-Crine Rodney Ehrlich and @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social 📚 /6

Stigma relating to tuberculosis infection prevention and control implementation in rural health facilities in South Africa — a qualitative study outlining opportunities for mitigation - BMC Global and... Background Tuberculosis (TB) is a stigmatised disease with intersectional associations with poverty, HIV, transmission risk and mortality. The use of visible TB infection prevention and control (IPC) ...

Link to the full paper here:

link.springer.com/article/10.1... 6/

Here I looked at how Ubuntu as African-centric approach can help mitigate this - through shifting the focus to communal wellbeing instead of individual protection, using universal infection control measures instead of targeted ones, and thinking about how health workers communicate about IPC. 5/

Next paper focusses on stigma: TB is a stigmatised disease because of its associations with poverty, HIV and its mortality. When only people who are ill with TB wear masks, masks become a symbol of TB and contribute to stigma. Yet they are important to prevent the spread of TB. 5/

We look at whether proficiency at TB IPC helped with Covid-19 IPC and how conceptualisations of what mask-wearing means changed. 😷 4/

It was a slow 14 year process. The organisation’s leader was actively involved in making sense of ☝️why TB IPC was important and ☝️what effective IPC entails. There were critical events, like a health worker falling ill with TB and opportunities to link TB IPC with other processes (eg. triage) 3/

Airborne infection prevention and control implementation: A positive deviant organisational case study of tuberculosis and COVID-19 at a South African rural district hospital There are many examples of poor TB infection prevention and control (IPC) implementation in the academic literature, describing a high-risk environment for nosocomial spread of airborne diseases to...

I conducted an organisational case study where TB infection control (mask wearing, ventilation, triage) is implemented well💡
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
This is a rural, low resource setting - so odds were stacked against success. What happened?? 2/

Hallo BlueSky! I’m excited to join the #TBsky #IDsky conversation - sharing some insights from my PhD. I used social science methods to understand how we can prevent the spread of TB.

Interested in how we can untangle stigma and mask-wearing? And what an exemplar case study shows? Read on!