Dark picture painted of Bay

Naomi Massyn and Pamela Groenewald, who compiled the statistical profile for Nelson Mandela Bay, said there were several concerns for the Bay, including that:

• One in 100 people in the metro are diagnosed with TB. Of these, 90% are co-infected with HIV/Aids;
• The metro also has one of the lowest HIV/Aids testing rates in the country; and
• Nelson Mandela Bay has the third-highest rate in the country of people who default on their TB treatment and ranks under the worst 10 metros in the country for deaths caused by TB, TB cure and successful TB treatment rates.

Eastern Cape health spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said they were aware of the TB problem in the metro and were trying to address it.

“The defaulter rate for Nelson Mandela Bay was 13% in 2013, but has decreased to 9.5% in the second quarter of 2014. This suggests that our interventions are effective.

“Although the TB defaulter rate is still high, it is declining. The Eastern Cape Department of Health has hired three vehicles for the use of outreach teams to follow up on patients receiving treatment, as well as tracing defaulters within the metro,” he said.

“The issue of drug and alcohol abuse is also contributing to patients not adhering to treatment.”

Kupelo said the department was also organising community dialogues to educate people.

According to the barometer, the metro excelled in the last year in reducing the number of teenage pregnancies, with only 5.7% of women having babies being under 18 years old.

Nelson Mandela Bay held onto its crown as the place where the most C-sections are done in the country, for the fourth year in a row with 41% of babies delivered this way.

While Nelson Mandela Bay was singled out for being the district with the highest death rate of newborns in hospital, the head of the department of paediatrics at Dora Nginza Hospital, Dr Lungile Pepeta, said this had been the result of a statistics glitch.

“The government’s data capturing system accidentally doubled our statistics,” Pepeta said.

“We have since informed the national Department of Health of this glitch. Our statistics are comparable with the national average of 10 deaths per 100 births.”

In their analysis of the causes of death in the metro, Massyn and Groenewald highlighted the high number of deaths of men aged between 15 to 24 as a result of injury and violence and specifically gunshot violence and road injuries.

“In the 15-to-24-year group, injury accounted for 62.2% of deaths among males compared with only 13.9% of females,” the barometer researchers said.