History of TB FREE

On April 22, 2002, Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Prize-winning former president of South Africa, announced a five-year agreement between his Foundation and a predecessor company of sanofi-aventis to help combat the widespread incidence of tuberculosis in South Africa.

To operationalize TB FREE and realize their ambitious goals, the project partners have established the Nelson Mandela Aventis Project for Combating TB, a Section 21 company under South African law. This innovative public-private partnership is intended to help improve TB detection and treatment rates by increasing tuberculosis awareness and compliance and enabling people affected by tuberculosis to be treated with the DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy, Short Course) strategy. Building an infrastructure to educate healthcare professionals and patients about the need to ensure consistency in treatments is central to the efforts of TB FREE.