Health e News
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In this audio report, a collage of the sounds and voices from the 14th International AIDS conference that ended in Barcelona on Friday July 12. Voices include Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Joep Lange (new president of the International AIDS Society).
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A report released at the Barcelona International AIDS conference says that if current trends continue, the number of young people living with HIV/AIDS could rise from the present estimate of 12,4 million to 21,5 million by the end of this decade. This has particular implications for sub-Saharan Africa where large proportions of many country’s populations are under 18 years of age.
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South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat has urged the world to immediately lay to rest the counterproductive debate between AIDS prevention and treatment.
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The fact that South Africa’s HIV prevalence rate stands at well over 20% and that of Thailand at less than three percent, illustrates the choices the two nations made about 10 years ago, according to William Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council.
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Going for an HIV test is far more successful than mass communication in getting people to change their sexual behaviour. But less than 10% of HIV positive South Africans know they carry the virus.
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The Medical Research Council recently released a policy brief entitled, “Orphans of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic – the time to act is now”. In it, the MRC predicts that if nothing is done, deaths due to AIDS will peak in 2010, while the wave of children orphaned as a result of HIV/AIDS will continue to increase, peaking in 2015 at around 1,85 million orphans. In this audio report, Sue Valentine hears from researchers in the field about what can be done.
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Combined TB and HIV infections are causing complications, with hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal seeing increasingly unusual presentations of TB, including TB-meningitis, mental retardation from TB and fits, according to KwaZulu-Natal Health MEC Dr Zweli Mkhize. Kerry Cullinan reports.
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Only about $41-million of an estimated $2,5-billion used on HIV/AIDS research globally, is spent on finding a vaccine for Africa. The need for more money to be injected into research in Africa as well as partnerships with African scientists were among the issues raised at the African AIDS Vaccine Programme’s conference held outside Cape Town. Anso Thom was there.
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Despite scientists’ optimism about the possibility of developing an AIDS vaccine, the world is “not ready” to make and distribute such a vaccine should it become available soon, according to Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
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Researchers from different parts of the country agree, households affected by AIDS tend to be much poorer than those which are “unaffected”. However, the silence about the disease has made it extremely difficult for researchers to document the extent of this damage and therefore to highlight the steps government needs to take to prevent these households from slipping ever deeper into poverty. Kathryn Strachan reports.
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Philipp Krebs, a Swiss-born artist who has lived in Cape Town for the past five years, creates unusual and extraordinary public works of art using balloons. In a project called Umbono, a Xhosa word that means vision, Krebs uses larger than life balloons to create awareness and educate people about safe sex and HIV/AIDS. Khopotso Bodibe went to view the Umbono exhibition, and filed this report.
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The Children’s Team from the South Coast Hospice in Port Shepstone have some 200 children on their books – children who have either been orphaned because of AIDS or who need support because their parents are HIV positive. In this audio report, we visit the home of a family of three on the lower south coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal who live in a tiny, one-roomed shack. When the caregivers give the 13-year old boy a memory box to decorate, he paints his dream – a colourful, five-roomed house for his mother, his sister and him.