The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) welcomes the Cabinet's instruction to the Department of Health to develop an operational plan within one month to provide ARVs in the public sector. The Cabinet endorsed the findings of the Joint Health and Treasury Task Team Report that between 500,000 and 1.7 million lives will be saved with anti-retroviral therapy. It also reaffirmed the science of HIV/AIDS pathogenesis and treatment. The TAC National Executive will formally suspend the civil disobedience campaign and reconsider pending litigation early next week. We welcome Cabinet's bold step today but we also remember the anguish, pain and unnecessary loss of lives over the last four years.
Related Link:
* Full report of the South African ARV task force
http://www.gov.za/reports/2003/ttr010803.pdf
Equity in Health
Shortages of essential medicines and medical equipment, a staffing crisis and inadequate infrastructure are undermining the quality of hospital care across sub-Saharan Africa. This could jeopardise plans to provide anti-AIDS drugs to people living with the HI virus, delegates attending the World Health Organisation (WHO) regional committee meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, heard this week.
The population of HIV/Aids-ravaged southern Africa is expected to decline by 22% by 2050, according to a recent study. The latest world population data sheet of the United States-based Population Reference Bureau estimates South Africa's population will drop from 44 million this year to 35.1 million in 2025, and to 32.5 million in 2050 - a 26% decline.
The population of HIV/Aids-ravaged southern Africa is expected to decline by 22% by 2050, according to a recent study. The latest world population data sheet of the United States-based Population Reference Bureau estimates South Africa's population will drop from 44 million this year to 35.1 million in 2025, and to 32.5 million in 2050 - a 26% decline.
'Avoid Aids, come inside' says the sign outside the sex shop near the Durban beachfront. Just 100 meters away 500 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists, from 110 branches across South Africa, were meeting at the second TAC National Congress to plan how to carry on their fight for the roll out of a comprehensive treatment plan for the 5 million people living with HIV-AIDS. With the highest national HIV prevalence in the world, AIDS is estimated to have caused 40% of all adult deaths in 2001, as many as 1,000 people a day according to UNAIDS (a figure not challenged by the ANC government). Addressing the Congress on the final day, the historic nature of this campaign was underscored by the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS, Stephen Lewis, who compared TAC with some of the greatest social movements of the twentieth century and the "anti-globalisation" movement of the twenty-first.
Scientists and activists at South Africa's first national AIDS conference, which drew to a close on August 6, urged the government to roll out rapid drug treatment for millions of South Africans dying from the disease. "The message is: don't wait. You've got to do something, and you have got to do it now," Salim Abdool Karim, scientific chair of the conference, told Reuters. "This is not an attack on the government. This is scientific fact." The four-day conference was a watershed in South Africa's public debate on AIDS policy, which is dominated by angry efforts to persuade the government to launch a national treatment program with antiretroviral drugs, which many scientists say represent the only way to avoid catastrophe.
The World Health Organisation announced last month that it will create a new model to buy antiretroviral AIDS drugs in hopes of dramatically speeding distribution and reducing the cost of the life-saving medication. The plan comes from collaboration among tuberculosis experts, foremost among them the new WHO director general, Jong-wook Lee. That program, called the TB Drug Facility, purchases drugs in bulk on behalf of countries and then oversees the distribution.
Read a response to this article in the Letters section of Equinet News.
The Zambian government has instituted criteria to determine which of the country's 200,000 HIV/AIDS patients will have access to free antiretroviral drug treatment, Xinhua News Agency reports. Under the new guidelines, HIV-positive people wishing to access the drugs must undergo voluntary HIV testing and counselling as well as a clinical test to determine their viral load.
Figures released by the government last week showing a drop in the number of Zimbabweans infected by HIV/AIDS were only a correction of flawed estimates from previous surveys and did not mean the prevalence of the disease was declining in the country, HIV/AIDS experts said.
The quest for drugs to fight the world's most neglected tropical infectious diseases gained fresh momentum with the formal launch of the "drugs for neglected diseases" initiative this week. Médecins Sans Frontières has teamed up with five international public organisations to promote affordable and effective drugs against leishmaniasis, human African trypanosomiasis, and Chagas' disease, among other infections that affect millions of people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.