News

SAAVI announced today that the South African Medicines Control Council (MCC) has approved the first human clinical trial for a phase I HIV vaccine trial in South Africa. This is a phase I human clinical trial of the AlphaVax replicon Vector (ArV TM) clade C candidate HIV-1 vaccine to assess the safety and immune system responses induced by this new vaccine technology. The trial will involve a small number of volunteers in both the USA and South Africa. The approval was the subject of a separate MCC announcement.

Swaziland has the dubious distinction of having the second highest HIV prevalence rate in the world, and there are no signs that its epidemic is stabilising.

The Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria faces bankruptcy and the G8 nations are to blame, according to Health GAP (Global Access Project). By Anso Thom.

Treatment Action Campaign leader Zackie Achmat has received the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health Human Rights by the Washington-based Global Health Council. He was awarded it jointly with Dr Frenk Guni, the former director of the Zimbabwe Network of People living with HIV/AIDS. The award carries USD 20 000 prize money, half of which Achmat donated to TAC. The award was accepted in Washington on behalf of Achmat by TAC's women's health programmes co-ordinator Nonkosi Khumalo. Click to read the full speech.

The death of a Mozambican miner after a leg injury is the subject of a complicated legal wrangle with potentially serious implications for the mining industry and workers who are HIV positive.

After last year’s shocking finding that 5.6% of South African children between the ages of two and 14 were HIV positive, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has announced that it will conduct further research. By Kerry Cullinan.

While Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang made in clear in her R8,38-billion Budget speech today (13 May) that the decision to provide anti-retroviral drugs in the public sector rested with Cabinet, her speech contained other good news.

There is a growing momentum for churches to become involved in the fight agains HIV/AIDS. Essentially they have no choice as increasing numbers congregants or their loved ones die and nowadays, according to one pastor, “you see more people at the cemeteries than at the soccer stadiums.”

Just when everyone thought the 18-month standoff between the South African government and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) had finally ended, government announced it needed another four weeks.

AIDS activists from the developed world have joined forces in the hope of pressurising the G8 nations to meet the budget shortfall faced by the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. By Anso Thom

Nine kilograms. That was the daily difference in tea leaves picked by a Kenyan tea plucker with AIDS in the last three months of his or her life and a healthy worker. In a painstaking study, presented at a recent conference organised by the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research division (Heard) of the University of Natal, researchers from Boston University’s Centre for International Health tracked the daily outputs of 54 tea pluckers who had died of AIDS-related illnesses in the last three years of their lives. They compared these with the outputs of 216 healthy workers.

Over 680 teachers in KwaZulu-Natal - more than 55 a month - died in-service in 2000. Most died from unspecified illnesses, and the average age at the time of death was 36.

The Health Systems Trust’s annual SA Health Review shows little more than piecemeal progress in health transformation in 2002. By Kerry Cullinan.

Universal access to Highly Active Anti-retroviral Therapy (HAART) will become an inevitable reality in South Africa over the next three to seven years, according the South African Health Review.

A grim picture has emerged of the eating patterns of South African children with more than 72 percent of those who took part in a survey surviving on a daily diet of only sugar and maize.

CAPE TOWN - AIDS activists from around the world have been invited to join South Africans on April 27 and 28 in civil disobedience and protest campaigns should Government fail to implement a national treatment plan. Speaking at the opening of the International Treatment Preparedness Summit in Cape Town, Treatment Action Campaign chairperson Zackie Achmat called on delegates from 67 countries to picket outside South African embassies.

Between six and nine million people in developing countries currently urgently need anti-retroviral treatment while in reality only between 230 000 and 300 000 have access to these drugs, according to a report by HealthGAP, a US-based human rights group.

Preventable, treatable and curable diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and thrush, for which there are often free or cheap drugs, are causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive people, the United States based Treatment Action Group (TAG) has revealed.Speaking at the Treatment Preparedness Summit recently held in Cape Town, TAG executive director Mark Harrington said that treatable and curable opportunistic infections were responsible for the deaths of most people infected with HIV/AIDS. Anso Thom reports.

Although South Africa has no “policy as such” to provide anti-retrovirals to people living with HIV/AIDS, it was relying on the private sector to advise it on the implications and complications of such a programme. Speaking at Parliament’s health committee meeting this week, Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, said her department needed to be clear about what it wanted to do.

Investigations into the introduction of a national anti-retroviral programme for South Africans living with HIV/AIDS are far advanced and recommendations are close to finalisation, it was announced in this week’s budget documents.