News

The first six months of antiretroviral therapy have forced AIDS activist Zackie Achmat to review his life.

Mpumalanga province’s health department, once viewed as corrupt and inept, is experiencing a healthy revival.

Two million out of 9,4 million KwaZulu-Natal residents who live mostly in rural areas and informal settlements still don't have adequate care in South Africa's most populous province.

Families are reducing their food intake as a first strategy to cope with the increased financial burden of caring for a sick or dying HIV positive family member.

Migration is taking its toll on health services in Gauteng, South Africa’s economic powerhouse.

Ten years later, health services in the flat, often bleak, central province of Free State are stable and the quality of care is improving.

One of the best-resourced provinces in the country, the Western Cape’s health services function well.

In the remote villages of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, an innovative pilot project on gender and AIDS awareness offers rural women an opportunity for empowerment.

Huge staff shortages and weak primary care are the two most pressing problems in the Eastern Cape health system, but there are signs of improvement in provincial management.

The largest representative survey of South African youth aged between 15 and 24 shows that by the age of 23, one in five South African youth are HIV positive. The research also confirms findings from the government's 2002 ante-natal clinic survey as well as the HSRC survey of 2002 that HIV prevalence in this age group appears to be stabilizing.

The largest representative sample of South African youth ever conducted has found that almost one third of sexually experienced women reported that they did not want to have their first sexual encounter and that they had been coerced into having sex.

Although one in 10 South African youths aged between 15 and 24 is HIV positive, 96 percent of 15 year olds are HIV negative.

More than 60 percent of youth who tested HIV positive in the largest survey ever of South Africans aged between 15 and 24 said that they believed that they were at low risk of contracting the virus.

With serious staff shortages and a rural population of up to 65 percent, bringing health to the people of the North West Province is no easy job.

Plagued by poverty, drought, inadequate access to basic services and huge inequities, Limpopo faces enormous hurdles in bringing health to its 5,8-million inhabitants.

South Africa is among 10 hotspots of multi-drug resistant TB identified by the World Health Organisation and at Durban’s busiest TB treatment clinic, rates of MDR TB have more than doubled in the past three years.

An unconventional approach to health provision at the Medicins Sans Frontieres first rural HIV/AIDS programme in Lusikisiki has yielded impressive results.

There appears to be an increase in child rape including cases involving children raping other children.

Interviewed by the national public broadcaster the weekend after his state of the nation address, President Thabo Mbeki still seemed determined to ignore and obfuscate the impact of HIV/AIDS on the country. Health-e examines his remarks.

The relationship between the South African government and the Clinton Foundation, which helped procure low cost antiretroviral drugs for the country's long-awaited AIDS treatment programme, appears to have broken down.