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.
The Gauteng government is actively expanding its campaign to prevent HIV positive pregnant women from passing the virus on to their babies, yet many mothers in the province are still reluctant to know their HIV status.
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.
The Treatment Action Campaign's decision to turn to the courts comes after four years of campaigning for a national programme to prevent mother to child transmission (MTCT).
Traditional healer Credo Mutwa drew a large audience when he spoke at the sexuality education conference in Midrand this week. He called for a resurgence of African tradition to recreate the values needed to combat HIV/AIDS, but also expressed some surprising and unorthodox views as to the origins of the virus.
The national conference on sexuality has laid the groundwork to ensure that sexuality education will be part of the school curriculum next year.
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.
Five AIDS orphans from Ingwavuma in northern KwaZulu-Natal are to be part of a national meeting in Cape Town aimed at giving children affected by HIV/AIDS the opportunity to explain how they would like to be helped.
A conference on sexuality education convened by the National Ministry of Education this week is grappling with its ambitious goal of formulating resolutions on the kind of education to be included in the school curriculum.
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.
In certain hospitals the shortage of doctors has led to a three-fold increase in the infant mortality rate. This statistic can be reversed easily in those hospitals that are sufficiently staffed and adopt a team approach. In this audio report we hear some views about whether the community service programme for doctors is working as a means to redress the shortage of doctors in rural areas.
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.
Advocacy and activism are two skills that rural doctors might need to develop if they hope to be able to offer decent healthcare to patients. This was the message delivered by Dr Trudy Thomas, the former MEC for Health in the Eastern Cape, in one of the keynote addresses delivered to the conference of the Rural Doctors Association of South Africa (Rudasa) last weekend. She said that the promise of the Reconstruction and Development Programme of 1994 had largely been betrayed by budget cuts and a lack of political will to transform and extend health care to the country's poor and rural people.
A Genetic Birth Defects Conference hosted by the Department of Health heard yesterday that limited resources at public hospitals meant that children with Down Syndrome were often refused heart surgery.
Delegates at the International Conference on Birth Defects and Disabilities in the developing World have called for the establishment of a Medical Genetics Advisory Board to ensure that human rights are respected as genetic testing and counseling becomes available.
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