The woman pulls the navy anorak tighter around her tall frame, turning her face away from the howling southeaster pushing against corrugated iron shacks. She steps inside a dimly lit room where the young man sits up in his bed to meet her.
Around a quarter of South Africans could suffer from mental illness each year, while HIV/AIDS is systematically undermining all the health gains made in the post-apartheid era, according to the SA Health Review.
Global targets to reach universal access to antiretroviral treatment are vague and abstract and will result in the dealth of millions of people, a civil society report warned this week.
When soft-spoken theatre nurse Nomalungelo Konza lay critically ill in GF Jooste Hospital's medical ward in 2003, her colleagues prepared for the worst.
Her body weak from tuberculosis, she lay semi-comatose and many believed she would not pull through.
Macassar residents have grown accustomed to seeing the figures of Emma van der Merwe, tall and upright, towering over her colleague Barbara de Wet, walking the streets of the Helderberg suburb, come rain or shine.
'Morning Virginia! How are you? How's the Kaletra? Okay?' the diminutive woman hollers across the clinic passage.
The elderly woman, her thinning grey hair swept into a tiny ponytail, kicks her feet under the blue hospital blanket and lets out a long moan. She rocks her head from side to side and wails quietly, before turning onto her side.
Forty-nine frozen bodies, some as tiny as chickens, are trussed up in white plastic in cold storage in Stanger Hospital's morgue.
Young people between 15 and 24 have been identified as the priority by the country's new HIV/AIDS strategic plan, due to be presented to the country on Friday (1 Dec).
Gauteng has the most extensive provincial HIV/AIDS programme in the country, and has more than tripled the number of people on antiretroviral drugs in the past year alone.
Tambo Memorial Hospital on Gauteng's East Rand used to be over-burdened by alcohol related trauma cases. Today the pressure is primarily related to HIV and AIDS.
Over 300 cases of extremely drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) have been diagnosed in South Africa and this number is set to rise as the country pays the price for a poor TB control programme that has gone unchecked for years.
Nurses are at the forefront of providing care for HIV-infected patients. A new book, 'The Pocket Guide for HIV and AIDS Nursing Care', aims to sharpen their knowledge and skills as well as address nurses' own struggles with AIDS.
Two thirds of all persons infected with HIV are living in sub-Saharan Africa ' 24,7-milllion people ' while 2,8-million adults and children became infected this year alone. This is more than all the other regions in the world combined according to the latest figures published in the UNUAIDS/WHO 2006 AIDS Epidemic Update.
With the health minister out of the limelight due to illness, her deputy, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, has stepped out of the shadows with a fresh take on HIV/AIDS.
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