News

A prison story from Nelson Mandela captivated journalists at the world AIDS conference as the former president used the opportunity to drive home the link between HIV and TB.

It was a process of turning down the heat as South African scientists, health workers, government officials and activists met to clarify recent statements by the Medicines Control Council and the Minister of Health at lunchtime.

A little corner of the Impact Conference Centre in Bangkok felt like home but for all the wrong reasons.

In a world of numbers and science, the human dimension of HIV/AIDS is less easily quantifiable but critically important. Human rights and language featured strongly in the Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture at the Bangkok AIDS conference.

The World Health Organisation has high expectations of what South Africa’s care and treatment plan for HIV/AIDS can mean for encouraging other African countries to introduce similar programmes.

The Treatment Action Campaign was given a key platform at the XV International AIDS Conference to address delegates on the confusion regarding the South African health department’s position on the use of nevirapine.

The Medicines Control Council has said that it did not foresee any disruption to the mother to child prevention HIV programme in South Africa in the light of the announcement that the antiretroviral drug nevirapine was not recommended as a single treatment.

Across Africa and in over 100 impoverished nations worldwide, the most vulnerable children - AIDS orphans, girls and the poor - are denied access to education.

A poster held high by a Thai activist before the opening of the International AIDS conference in Bangkok summed up the urgency of the situation: “You talk, we die, AIDS treatment, access now.”

Nevirapine will no longer be the only antiretroviral drug being offered to pregnant HIV positive mothers to prevent them passing the virus on to their newborn babies.

HIV/AIDS is a problem that is mainly “moral, social and economic” rather than a health issue,Ugandan President Yuweri Museveni told delegates at the International AIDS conference in Bangkok.

Hopes for a controversy-free South African presence at the 15th International AIDS conference were dashed when the health minister opened the South African stand at the conference.

The XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, sounds a call to further action in the global fight against HIV and AIDS.

Political prevarication and weak management has hampered the implementation of the Operational Plan for Comprehensive HIV and AIDS Care, Management and Treatment for South Africa a new report has found.

AIDS activists have accused US President George Bush of hampering HIV prevention campaigns.

The Centre for the Study of AIDS (CSA) at the University of Pretoria has signed a memorandum of understanding with the HIV/AIDS Impact on Education Clearinghouse during June 2004. The Clearinghouse is coordinated by the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)/UNESCO. This new partnership hopes to ensure that quality information on HIV/AIDS and education from the CSA and its national and regional partners are made available to researchers and practitioners throughout the region. Two employees from the CSA, Barry van Wyk and Johan Maritz, were made chief editors in the Clearinghouse to initiate this partnership.

Seven of the nine provinces recently presented their health budgets to the portfolio committee in Parliament. Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal have still to appear. Health-e sat in on the presentations.

Teenage pregnancies, alcohol abuse and poverty are key health concerns in the Northern Cape, the country’s largest and sparsest province.

International Children’s Day today (June 1) has led to renewed calls for children to receive lifesaving social grants. But many still receive nothing. Elvis Lerale and Theresa Chabalala are both orphans and live in Limpopo. Health-e first visited them three years ago and returned recently to Maupye and Radoo villages to find that one of them has secured a social grant, while the other still lives in abject poverty.

How do you get people to change their sexual behaviour so that they are not at risk of getting HIV/AIDS? Not by simply giving them the "right" information and assuming that they will modify what they do.