About Tuberculosis

Established in 2006, the TB department has a well-established technical team of professionals with wide experience in the rapid scale-up of TB services, research, and prisons health interventions, organized into programmatic work, implementation research and clinical trials research. Under this structure the department collaborates with multiple partners (both governmental and non-governmental) at the local, regional and international level to improve TB and TB/HIV care in Zambia.

The TB team has full-time staff made up of Epidemiologist, public health specialist, medical doctors, clinical officers, nurses, project coordinators, strategic information managers, data entry staff, TB laboratory staff and administrative support staff

The extensive portfolio of work conducted by the TB department is supported by funding received through numerous competitive grant processes from multiple agencies including: NIH, WHO, CDC, CFAR (NIH), AERAS (TB vaccine research), TB Alliance (TB drug research), UK Department for International development (DFID), Elton John Foundation, USAID, FIND, HVTN, Stop TB Partnership/ TB REACH mechanism, B&M gates Foundation

The department is support by a state-of-the-art TB laboratory. The TB laboratory can handle up to 12,000 primary specimens per year employing: 1) florescence and ZN smear microscopy, 2) liquid (MGIT 960) and solid (LJ) culture, 3) line probe assay for rapid identification of mycobacteria and drug susceptibility testing, 4) blood culture capacity and 5) first line drug susceptibility testing using liquid culture system 6) Xpert MTB/RIF and 7) Quantiferon-TB Gold. All activities are covered with two EQA programs from UK NEQAS, INSTAND (Germany) and CAP (College of American Pathologists).

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