Bloomberg Thuto Pulane had just wrapped up a promising internship in marketing when she lost 13 kilos over two months and started coughing up green phlegm.
She grew weaker and decided to visit a nearby clinic to get help after returning home from a family trip. Turns out Pulane had the world’s deadliest curable infectious disease, one she remembered learning about at school: tuberculosis.
The young woman was told the standard treatment would be a six-month course of antibiotics and she would risk contaminating her brother, who shares a house with her in South Africa’s northern city of Rustenburg.