Health e News
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The Health Minister has until today, (Wednesday 12th) to respond to court papers demanding that she offers the anti-AIDS drug Nevirapine to all pregnant HIV positive women.
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The new head of the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative is a former medical doctor and virologist who has moved a long way from his one-time vision of himself as a rural GP administering to poor people in remote areas. So who is Dr Tim Tucker?
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The National Children’s Forum brought together 90 children from around the country to talk about how HIV/AIDS is affecting them – either directly or indirectly. In this audio report, two children describe their lives and forum organiser, Sonja Giese of the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, speaks about the successes and disappointments of the workshop. If you’d like to donate money to any of the organisations working with children infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, please visit the non-profit, “kidz positive” website at www.kidzpositive.org
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Ninety children, in one way or another severely and personally affected by the AIDS epidemic, made their voices heard this week by sharing their stories of grief, hope, sadness and pain with adults.
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The Department of Health has still not tied up an agreement with drug manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim, which would ensure the free supply of its anti-AIDS drug, nevirapine, to South Africa and all other SADC countries for five years.
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As the Treatment Action Campaign lodged papers in the Pretoria High court in a bid to compel the government to implement a national programme to prevent the mother to child transmission of HIV, two mothers spoke out about their experience of pregnancy. One did not know her HIV status and gave birth to a daughter who was HIV+ and died nine months later. The other was reached by the MTCT programme in Khayelitsha and has a healthy, happy two year old.
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After four years of calling for a comprehensive programme to prevent the mother to child transmission of HIV, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) will take the Minister of Health and all nine MEC’s for health to court in an attempt to ensure that a national plan is implemented.
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An interview in Sesotho and English with the head of the Medical Research Council, Prof Malegapuru Makgoba. He explains that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. Poverty can only exacerbate the impact of the virus.
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The anti-retroviral therapy programme being offered free of charge to adults in Khayelitsha, Cape Town by the Western Cape government and Medecins Sans Frontieres aims to show that it is possible and economically sensible to treat people living with HIV/AIDS.
Despite the fact that most rural doctors work in more difficult conditions than their urban counterparts, they generally enjoy fewer benefits and are often treated as second class citizens by the medical fraternity. In a presentation to the annual conference of the Rural Doctors Association of South Africa this past weekend the dean of the medical faculty at Wits University, Prof Max Price, suggested a new approach to begin to value rural doctors for their skills.
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Few would disagree that there could be a more worthy winner in the health category of the Shoprite Checkers/SABC 3 Woman of the Year than Veronica Khosa, or Mama Khosa as she is known in the Gauteng community of Mamelodi.
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Earlier this week the Lovetrain was launched in Cape Town as part of the national loveLife campaign to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and HIV among South African teenagers. The campaign, funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the South African government is the largest initiative of its kind in the country. It’s aim is to halve the number of HIV infections among South African youth within the next five years. But what are young people themselves saying about the challenges they face socially and sexually?