Professor Salome Charalambous

How are you going to provide the services when you find somebody who has TB?

How are you going to then refer to the public health system and so on?

So we'd spend a lot of time setting up memorandums and standing.

We'd spend a lot of time getting teams in place.

And then we'd also purchased big vehicles and so on, because what we were doing was we were doing community screening for TB using people

big chest X-ray trucks and so on.

And so that all took quite a long time to get in place.

And we were running for about six months when the funding was cut.

And that was just devastating.

You know, like we were just feeling like we're starting to make inroads in these communities.

We are identifying people that have TB.

We were putting people on preventive treatment to stop TB in people who were at high risk.

And then that was just stopped.

and um people were obviously extremely devastated you know they couldn't do their jobs they didn't know whether they would have work going forward whether they didn't know whether they had a job um and unfortunately that ended up with us having to cancel their contracts and stop that was the end of it the 26th of january that was the end of it and so yeah we were we were also devastated the

The trucks came back to the office.

They were just lying there.

And everything, all the preparation was for nothing.

And then the biggest problem on top of all of that is that a lot of the data management systems were also at that time being paid for by the US government.

We don't even have a way of measuring what the impact of the cuts are because in many cases those systems just shut down.

And so that's really hard because I don't think anyone will ever find out exactly the impact of these.