PMTCT making small gains in North West Province
The immunisation rate of babies dropped by 5% to a countrywide low of 71%. The biggest decrease was in the Bojanala district, where there was a drop in immunisation coverage of 10% to 61.7%.
The TB cure rate dropped from 60% to 58%.
‘This is an indictment on management that the priority TB programme showed no improvement and this requires greater attention,’ notes the Barometer.
However, the province seems to be slowly improving its people’s health status on other indicators.
Its per capita expenditure on primary health care is R308 ‘ the second highest in the country. This is relatively equally spread between the four districts.
Almost three-quarters of pregnant women are now tested for HIV. In Bophirima district, the HIV testing rate more than doubled, indicating that the provincial authorities are paying attention to implementing the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission programme.
The incidence of sexually transmitted infections has dropped steadily although the condom distribution rate has remained constant.
Other Provinces:
Author
-
Kerry Cullinan is the Managing Editor at Health-e News Service. Follow her on Twitter @kerrycullinan11
View all posts
Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
PMTCT making small gains in North West Province
by Kerry Cullinan, Health-e News
February 22, 2008