DURBAN '€“ South Africa needs to formulate a truly strategic HIV/AIDS and TB plan rather than an unstrategic wish-list when writing the new National Strategic Plan (NSP) for 2012-2016, Mark Heywood told delegates at the 5th South African AIDS Conference this week.
DURBAN - South Africa is making real progress in shifting HIV treatment delivery to lower levels of health workers, enabling more patients to be reached.
DURBAN - Despite under-reporting of deaths more than 80% of patients on antiretrovirals (ARVs) in South Africa are still alive five years into their treatment programme.
HIV Clinicians this week released a set of groundbreaking consensus guidelines for clinicians who assist HIV positive individual and couples wishing to fall pregnant.
On the 30th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, the SA health department is ready to give antiretroviral medication to all those with CD4 counts of 350 and below.
Since the discovery last year that a vaginal gel containing an antiretroviral called tenofovir can protect women from HIV, scientists have been working hard to support and fast-track the results.
Male condoms are a widely used HIV preventative measure in South Africa. However, even though male condoms may seem relatively easy to use, they often present problems such as breaking and slipping off.
Some Gauteng clinics have recently experienced shortages of critical antiretroviral drugs placing patients at risk of developing resistance to their treatment.
A multi-national study shows that if an HIV-positive person starts taking antiretroviral therapy early on, that is, when their CD 4 count is still high, their chances of infecting their HIV-negative partner can decrease by as much as 96%.
The extent of tuberculosis and HIV co-infection rates in South Africa has firmly placed tuberculosis on the agenda of the South African National AIDS Council. This, after studies have shown that in some parts of the country, like in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape for example, about 73% of HIV-infected people also have TB.
A clinical trial aimed at investigating whether an antiretroviral pill a day could prevent women from getting HIV was abandoned yesterday (Mon 18 April).
Despite widely acknowledging that in some parts of the country like Khayelitsha in the Western Cape, about 73% of people with HIV also have Tuberculosis, Health Department programmes have failed to screen HIV-positive people for TB and to protect them from getting the bacterial infection.
TB can hold serious physical and psychological consequences for those who are infected, and for children the diagnosis is often even bleaker. Dipuo Sedibe of Health-e News Service spent a day with a group of youngsters and their carers at Brooklyn Chest Hospital in Cape Town.
Finding ways to effectively diagnose, prevent and treat tuberculosis in children is severely neglected, according to experts.
The 18th Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) was recently held in Boston.
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