BEN MACLENNAN, Cape Town | Tuesday
HEALTH Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has pleaded for greater understanding from the media of her department’s fight against Aids.
”We are in the driving seat but of course we need to bring everybody else on board to understand which direction we are moving (in),” she said in Cape Town on Tuesday.
She was speaking after a meeting with Western Cape health MEC Piet Meyer and his senior officials, who have been overseeing a roll-out of an Aids drug programme that directly flouts national policy.
However the meeting did not deal with HIV/Aids, concentrating instead on issues including proposed cutbacks in subsidies for tertiary health care in the province.
For this reason, she told journalists, she had asked to come back for a special session on Aids in the province.
Tshabalala-Msimang has been under fire for her reluctance to approve expansion of the mother-to-child transmission prevention programme in other provinces beyond a handful of test sites.
However she said South Africa was moving in the correct direction, and that this was a view supported by UNAids, and by Unicef and Markinor surveys.
”I’m just hoping that the media can begin to interact with us from that perspective to say the department of health plus the provinces are not letting down this country in terms of our response,” she said.
Her department would soon release the results of its latest antenatal survey ”which is going to have an indication that whatever programmes we put in place are really beginning to bear fruits”.
She said her meeting with the Western Cape health authorities her first since an African National Congress/New National Party coalition took over government there last year was a signal that ”at last even around this issue we are going to find each other and talk a common language”.
Asked whether the Western Cape anti-retroviral programme was not a full-scale rollout rather than simply a research project, she said this was precisely why she wanted to come back to the province and have a ”in-depth” discussion.
”I have been reading about this in the newspapers, what the Western Cape wants to do, but we’ve never a really interrogated it at Minmec (a meeting of ministers and MECs) level.
”As I say, we must work as one national health care system. So I will becoming back to the Western Cape so that we can look at what they are doing.
”But as far as Minmec and the national department of health is concerned we are still at the research site level.”
She said that despite cutbacks to tertiary health services in the Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, her department would work closely with the provinces to maintain ”national assets” such as the Red Cross Children’s Hospital at an appropriate level.
Red Cross served not only South Africa but the region and continent.
”We also want to see what we can do internationally to assist this national asset, she said. – Sapa