TB+

TB+

Tuberculosis, commonly refered to as TB, is often thought to be a "disease of the past", that it has been eliminated from this world. But it has re-emerged as a global threat, with one third of the worlds' population latently infected. TB is the leading killer of people with HIV: one is able to live with HIV, but is dying from TB. Anyone can get TB, but the disease is strongly linked to poverty and malnutrition. Even if the medication exists in certain places, people have to get to the medication, or the medication has to get to them. Someone dies of TB in the world every 18 seconds. Normal tuberculosis, if treated diligently, is very inexpensive (only $20 per patient) and doesn’t take very long to cure. But if normal TB is not treated, it mutates and becomes 100 times more expensive, requires a two-year cure and a long stay in the hospital, which many of those infected cannot afford. Cases of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extremely-resistant TB (XDR-TB) have been found in almost every country of the world. It is not clearly known how far these strains have spread. A world-wide pandemic of XDR-TB is feared for, because it is still uncurable at present . Reversing the TB epidemic is a political issue as much as it is a health issue. The WHO estimates that it will cost approximately $6.7 billion annually to reverse the TB epidemic. Currently, only slightly more than half of that is projected to be available at current funding levels. This gap is costing millions of lives. In January 2008 I travelled to Pieri, South-Sudan, to photograph a small MSF field clinic and its patients. TB+ is meant to give a human face to the disease Tuberculosis. Who are these patients? How has TB affected their lives? How do they normally live if healthy? Therefore I mixed 'classical' portraits of the patients with images of their immediate surroundings: the village life, the vast landscape they live in, and images of fellow Nuer tribesmen with their cattle.