A new book, the Virus, Vitamins and Vegetables, documenting the South African government's controversial response to the AIDS epidemic was launched in Durban and Johannesburg, recently.

South Africa's HIV/AIDS treatment programme is short of funds, yet the ANC wants to restructure the health system with a very costly National Health Insurance scheme.

DURBAN - KwaZulu-Natal was making huge strides in controlling multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB and extensively-drug resistant (XDR) TB, but a staggering 50 to 60% of patients were dying while they are awaiting diagnosis which takes between four and six weeks.

It'€™s that time of the year when a lot of us will be sniffing, coughing and even sneezing. Doctors say getting the influenza vaccine in April, will go a long way in preventing respiratory infections.

Home-based care, even for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis, is working well at a pilot project in Khayelitsha started in late 2007.

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) says the Free State moratorium on the provision of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs for new patients was never lifted. The provincial government imposed the moratorium on the lifesaving drugs in November of 2008.

Pope Benedict XVI is in Africa this week (17th-23rd March) on his first trip to the continent as Pontiff and is already angering AIDS activists with his anti-condom stance.

With virtually all KwaZulu-Natal health facilities registering cases of extensively drug-resistant TB, the multi-million rand international research facility will be well placed to find research subjects.

In this opinion piece Nathan Geffen and Paul Booth make the case for the male circumcision debate to put to rest and for the urgent development of an ethical national voluntary male medical circumcision policy.

Somewhere around 1 November 2008 the death penalty was reintroduced in the Free State. Quietly, with the stroke of a pen, an official in the Department of Health in Bloemfontein signed a memorandum introducing a moratorium declaring that no new patients should be put on anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. This was to be for the next five months '€“ until the new financial year, April 1 2009 -- when the funds would return.

SA NGOs condemn statements made by former health minister at UN session of the Commission on the Status of Women looking at caregiving in the context of HIV/AIDS

JOHANNESBURG:(PlusNews) - 2009 might just be the year that HIV prevention finally takes centre stage in South Africa. Years of workshops and speeches in which AIDS experts and politicians talked about the need to prioritise prevention are, at last, translating into action.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has released a report on the feasibility of a groundbreaking nurse-driven HIV and TB care and treatment programme following a three year stint in Lesotho.

Does having more than one sexual partner form part of tradition? What role does the practice play in the transmission of HIV?