More than 300 people attended the Treatment Action Campaign's Western Cape provincial conference this weekend. The organisation declared its intention to begin a campaign in April to ensure that clinics offered basic medicines and treated people with HIV/AIDS with dignity and respect.
HIV/AIDS will have a massive and long term impact on South African society. In the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal, extended families are already absorbing the consequences of what it means when both parents die. In this report, we meet Rose Vumase, a 64-year grandmother who lives in Manguzi, near the Mozambique border and we hear from economist, Alan Whiteside, director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of Natal, Durban.
Health economists have responded cautiously to Finance Minister Trevor Manuel'€™s "generous" allocations towards interventions targeting HIV/AIDS.Manuel announced a R300-million supplementary allocation for targeted HIV/AIDS interventions in 2002/03 and R313,5-million in 2003/04.
More than a thousand people applauded religious leaders when they urged government to see to the health care needs of its people at an inter-faith service in St George's cathedral in Cape Town last week (Feb 12). The crowd then joined a march to Parliament organised by the Treatment Action Campaign calling for an HIV/AIDS treatment plan by June 16 and for trade and industry minister Alec Erwin to use his powers under the Patents Act to licence the necessary anti-retrovirals for a treatment plan. Sue Valentine followed the march through Cape Town and spoke to its leaders.
From 1 April, government will offer HIV positive pregnant women in Durban and Pietermaritzburg the anti-retroviral drug, nevirapine, for free to prevent them from transmitting the virus to their babies. Kerry Cullinan reports.
The United Nations Secretary-General says HIV/AIDS is the biggest challenge of our time and has called for intensified and broadened political and financial commitments by nations in their response to the AIDS crisis.
Almost two years after Gauteng?s Commission of Inquiry into Hospital Care Practices, the provincial Department of Health has been working to implement some of the commission's recommendations -- aimed at ultimately improving hospital services. But senior specialists at the province?s two largest hospitals believe that little has changed. In fact they believe certain things are worse. Is this a fair assessment or have things changed, even though progress may be slow. Anso Thom spoke to those at the coal face?
The Western Cape Health Department confirmed this week that the results of tests conducted on a man suspected of carrying Congo Fever are positive. The  Maitland abbatoir worker is being treated in an isolation ward at Groote  Schuur Hospital. About 90 people, including family, colleagues and health workers have come into contact with him, but what are the facts around this disease?
International poverty relief organisation, Oxfam has thrown its weight behind the South African Government and AIDS activists'€™ attempts to bring affordable life-saving drugs to marginalised South African communities. Launching Oxfam Great Britain'€™s (GB) "Cut the Cost" Campaign in Pretoria, International Director Stewart Wallis, said he hoped Government would "win the court case" against the pharmaceuticals. Anso Thom reports
The Rural Doctors Association of South Africa has urged government to act immediately to address the crisis in rural hospitals and to develop meaningful incentives to attract doctors to these areas. Among its concerns Rudasa lists the worrying statistic that only a quarter of community service doctors will work in rural hospitals this year and the continued difficulties experienced by foreign-qualified doctors to have their work permits renewed to serve in South African hospitals.
The Mail & Guardian newspaper recently printed two highly critical responses to Charlene Smith'€™s article on free medication and milk formula to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV (Mail & Guardian, January 26 '€“ Feb 1), but a letter sent to the newspaper by Professor Hoosen "Jerry" Coovadia, co-convenor of the AIDS 2000 Conference, Professor Anna Coutsoudis and other colleagues at the University of Natal went unpublished. Coutsoudis approached Health-e to clarify several key issues regarding HIV transmission and breast-feeding.
In this audio feature, we focus on the value of talking about sex and sexuality. Children and adolescents need to receive appropriate and accurate information to keep them safe and healthy in a society which has one of the fastest growing rates of HIV transmission in the world.
A grandmother, whose life was made a living hell after she was wrongly diagnosed HIV-positive is claiming R2-million in damages from the laboratory that tested her blood. Now she has launched a damages action against Van Drimmelen Laboratorium, the laboratory which carried out the initial test, claiming she suffered severe emotional stress, loss of dignity and humiliation as a result of the initial Elisa test finding that she was HIV positive. Subsequent tests showed that she was in fact HIV-negative. Health-e investigated the reliability of the Elisa test and others, the protocol followed by the life insurance industry and government'€™s own investigation into HIV testing'€¦
It stands to reason that if something affects you, you're more likely to take an interest in understanding it. Treatment literacy - the process of understanding how a disease affects you and what medication works best - is still relatively undeveloped in South Africa. In the United States, however, AIDS activists have not been content to leave the research into AIDS drugs in the hallo wed halls of scientific institutions. The Treatment Action Group based in New York has made substantial progress in ensuring that safe and effective medicines reach the people living with HIV/AIDS as fast as possible.
Living in denial about HIV/AIDS is not good for your mental or physical health. Three people with HIV/AIDS talk about living with the disease. Linda Sambata, Pholokgolo Ramothwala and Sindiswa Godwana all say that the more they learn about the virus and how to look after themselves, the better they feel about their lives.
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