For the last decade, everyone living and working with AIDS has been preoccupied with securing access to life-saving drugs. Now that just under a million South Africans are on ARVs, there's a new frontier in the fight against the virus: Safeguarding the human rights of people living with HIV.
For years South Africans battled to learn their sexual alphabet- A abstain, B be faithful and C condomise. Sexual behaviour has proved stubbornly resistant to change. The majority of people still do not understand that regular unprotected sex with more than one partner increases the risk of infection dramatically.
Women leaders in South Africa have hailed the outcome of a microbicide gel study, saying it will help protect women who can't negotiate safe sex with their partners against HIV infection.
Research shows that men are the main drivers of the HIV epidemic. Men transmit HIV to women, who, in turn, can infect their babies if they fall pregnant. But this can be prevented if men become a part of the woman's pregnancy.
Every 17 seconds a woman is raped in South Africa. According to the South African Police Services' 2006 rape statistics, close to 55 000 women reported being raped that year. But how many more rapes go unreported, and why?
Twenty-five percent of all women can develop some kind of vaginal infection. This is according to specialists, who say thrush and bacterial vaginosis are the most common. But, the majority of women are too ashamed to consult their doctors and would prefer to self-medicate, which may aggravate the infection.
At a week-long international summit in Johannesburg recently, men and women were challenged to step up the fight on gender-based violence.
In 2000, the world's leaders committed themselves to the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals to make our planet a healthier place to live in by the year 2015. Two-thirds of the deadline has already passed. Is the world succeeding in its commitments, for instance, to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases which are endemic in countries such as South Africa?
The Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and Sisonke have launched a helpline to give sex workers a voice.
President Jacob Zuma has declared that African leaders aimed to deliver on their commitments to allocate 15% of their budgets to health care and to allocate an amount for maternal, newborn and child health care.
Women in abusive relationships have a higher risk of being infected with HIV, a South African Medical Research Council study has found.
The death of a child's mother massively reduces the child's chances of survival to age 10 years, whereas the father's death has a negligible effect, a study on child survival in Bangladesh has found.
Pittsburgh ' A microbicide that researchers are pinning their hopes on is safe for use in pregnant women, according to a study presented at the Microbicide 2010 conference taking place in the United States this week.
A review of available studies on Efavirenz has found no increased risk of overall birth defects among women
exposed to the antiretroviral during the first trimester of pregnancy compared with exposure
to other antiretroviral drugs. The results were published in the AIDS Journal and comes after the South African Government opted not to include the drug due to what specialists described a unfounded fears of birth defects.
HIV prevalence among university students in South Africa is lower than in the general population, according to a new study. But HIV infection among female students is more than double that of their male counterparts.
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