They often say that TB and AIDS are best friends. In Swaziland, we have a national TB hospital. In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time there, because I have four babies whose mothers have passed away in the national TB hospital. In fact, if you go to the Egg Farmers of Canada website, you will see that on the very front page there's a picture of two beautiful little girls named Rachel and Leah, and they're eating hard-boiled eggs. Their mother was one who succumbed to multiple-drug-resistant TB.
I met with the doctors there and I went to visit that mother every week for almost a year, hoping that we could get her to live. I would bring her photos of her children. I would bring her short videos. I would bring her food, the protein she needed, hoping that if we could get her to live, I would have two orphans less. In the end, we moved her to our farm so that she could die with dignity.
No one knows what the numbers are, but when I sit with the doctors at that national TB hospital, they estimate that 70% of the country has active or inactive TB. They guess that 30% of that is drug resistant, which is a nightmare, because people transport all over the country in very crowded van, or what we call Kombis. These people are immune-suppressed, and it's a disaster.