Dr Farzana Ismail

Dr Farzana Ismail is a clinical microbiologist and initially worked as a consultant at a tertiary level Microbiology Laboratory attached to Academic Hospitals in Pretoria, providing specialist services in both infectious diseases, and infection control.

In 2017, she was appointed as the pathologist at the Centre for Tuberculosis (National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Johannesburg) and leads the WHO Supranational TB Reference Laboratory section of the Centre providing support to other National TB Reference Laboratories in the region. She has a keen interest in drug-resistant TB, diagnostic technologies, infection control and patient-centred care for TB. She plays a pivotal role in diagnostics policy for South Africa and was instrumental in the rollout of the National DRTB reflex testing algorithm for second-line drug-susceptibility testing (including Bedaquiline and Linezolid). She was also the laboratory lead for the first-ever South African National TB prevalence survey that was recently completed.

An important initiative since joining the Centre has been the provision of reference laboratory support for specialised testing to clinicians managing difficult to treat and highly resistant TB patients in South Africa and is a Member of the National Clinical Advisory Committee for DRTB. She also plays an important role in surveillance activities monitoring new drug resistance as well as patient pathways to TB diagnosis.

She is currently the acting Head of the Centre for Tuberculosis, and senior lecturer at the University of Pretoria, involved in training medical undergraduate and postgraduate students in clinical microbiology and infection control.