Activist fights for better TB drugs

Cape Town's Phumeza Tisile well remembers the Sunday in 2010 when she "knew something was wrong".

She went to the bathroom and could not hear the water running.

"I went to the TV room and turned on the television but still there was no sound."

"I cleaned my ears but there was still no sound."

The next day, she was diagnosed as deaf, her impairment a side effect of kanamycin, which is used to treat multidrug-resistant TB.

Tisile said she had not been warned about the risk of taking kanamycin.

She was studying at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology when she was diagnosed with TB.

After she was declared deaf, Tisile went to a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Khayelitsha where she was put on the antibiotic linezolid, which saved her life.

At the time, it was expensive - R600 a pill - but MSF earlier this year won the right from the Medicines Control Council to import a generic form of linezolid from India at R80 a tablet.

Tisile has become an advocate for better TB treatment and more drug development. She is to have a cochlear implant in January and is expected to regain some hearing.