News

People living with HIV/AIDS around the country are anxiously waiting to see whether Cabinet will approve an operational plan to introduce anti-retroviral drugs into the public health sector.

Every district in the country will be compelled to offer anti-retroviral drugs to citizens if Cabinet approves the drug rollout plan that is expected to be presented to it tomorrow. (Wednesday October 22).

In 1990 the World Bank predicted that within ten years there would be 1,2 million HIV infections in Brazil. Thirteen years later, this scenario has yet to materialise. Health-e News Service looks at the Brazilian response to HIV/AIDS.

South Africa is poised to launch the world's biggest anti-retroviral (ARV)drug treatment programme for people with AIDS.

Young girls are increasingly using sex to bargain for non-essentials such as fashion items and make-up studies have found.

Gender inequality contributes to South Africa's high levels of violence, hampers economic development, places strain on our health care system and is fuelling the AIDS crisis.

South Africa has possibly just experienced the most significant two weeks in the some 20-year history of the AIDS epidemic. It all began on Monday, July 28 when Medicines Control Council registrar, Dr Precious Matsoso, made the sudden and shocking announcement that nevirapine might be deregistered for use to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child.

Preparation for the roll-out of a state-funded antiretroviral treatment programme requires not only careful co-ordination, but a rigorous debate on how much money should be spent on the programme and where it will come from. As economist Dr Nicoli Nattrass argues in this article first published in Business Day, the burning question is not the compexity of rolling out antiretroviral therapy, but how much money government will allocate to AIDS interventions. Dr Nattrass is a professor in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town and Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit.

South Africa is on the brink of introducing anti-retroviral (ARV) medication in the public health sector. One of the major challenges is how to improve the health service infrastructure to ensure adequate delivery of these drugs. Dr Peter Barron, who is the Director of the Initiative for Sub District Support (ISDS) of the Health Systems Trust, recently addressed a symposium at Wits Univerversity on the topic of scaling up ARVs. While he argues that we must have a national ARV programme, he cautions that we have to do it right.

New evidence will be presented to the Medicines Control Council (MCC) in a bid to ensure that the anti-AIDS drug Nevirapine is not de-registered for prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

Some 16,3% of health workers are living with HIV, while at least 6000 health workers could be dying every year from AIDS-related illnesses, according to Dr Olive Shisana of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC).

Government's head of HIV/AIDS, Dr Nono Simelela, says she has been "spending sleepless nights asking what we are to do with mother-to-child-transmission if we can't have nevirapine".

While politicians continue to debate the finer points of anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment, Durban's McCord Hospital is helping HIV positive people to earn a living and raise money to pay for their own treatment.

As South African men struggle to define their identity, researchers grapple with what has made this country’s men into what they are.

A debate around compulsory HIV testing of miners is set to shake the mining industry in the coming months, raising concerns around discrimination versus the protection of miners if their HIV status is known. By Khopotso Bodibe and Nawaal Deane.

US president George Bush’s African tour which kicks off next week will no doubt involve lots of sturdy flesh pressing, posing for hundreds of photographs, lining up for traditional African dancing all of course the obligatory visit to a game farm somewhere in between. But many view the visit of the leader of the most powerful country in the world to this continent where millions are dying of preventable diseases, with enormous cynicism.

Few subjects have been surrounded with such contention in South Africa in the last decade as that of anti-retroviral treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. The discord regarding the merits or demerits of the AIDS drugs has spawned a veritable ‘war’ that came to epitomise a divided South African society on the complex issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. On the one hand, the South African government has been, at best, indecisive in its stance on anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs). Claiming the potential toxicity of the drugs, government has been constantly deferring a decisive decision on implementing an effective anti-retroviral treatment programme. On the other hand, government’s ambiguous policies have been publicly opposed by certain lobbying groups, most notably the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), who called on government to construct a more effective health-care system by forthwith implementing an HIV/AIDS treatment plan.

While the government holds up its mother-to-child HIV-transmission programme as the continent’s largest, it is turning into a shambles in many provinces.

Harassment, theft and selling sex to supplement their tiny incomes are common experiences for women trying to make a living as informal street traders. Informal traders vulnerable to HIV/AIDS By Kerry Cullinan

With a budget of R92 million, Khomanani, government’s HIV/AIDS communication campaign is due to end in three months. Was it public money well spent? Kerry Cullinan of Health-e News reports.