HIV/Aids barometer – January 2007

Zim healthcare strike: As Zimbabwe’s disgruntled doctors and nurses continue their strike over low salaries and poor working conditions, concern is growing about how the prolonged stayaway is affecting HIV-positive patients.

Doctors, who earn less than US$240 a month, are demanding an 8 000% increase to meet inflation, and high transport and food costs.

‘It is possible that some of our members have already died as a result of the strike. I urge the government to solve this matter urgently,” said Benjamin Mazhindu, national chairman of the Zimbabwe National Network for People Living with HIV. Mazhindu warned that if the strike continued, more HIV-positive people would develop side effects or become resistant to antiretroviral (ARV) medication, as any interruption in treatment can lead to the HIV becoming drug resistant, hastening progress towards Aids.

Itai Rusike of the Community Working Group of Health, a local NGO dealing with health matters in 25 districts, said people were no longer going to hospitals, and were waiting to die. ‘It’s a disaster in the making.”

Inevitably, women are bearing the brunt. Mary Sandasi, executive director of the Women and Aids Support Network, said pregnant women on ARV treatment have no access to healthcare workers, which could lead to complications in childbirth.

Few Zimbabweans can afford private healthcare as they are grappling with an unemployment level above 80% and inflation that has reached 1 281%, the highest in the world.

Source: Plusnews

Aids related deaths in South Africa: 2 033 893 at noon on January 31

ARVs for refugees: The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has launched a new policy to ensure that HIV-positive refugees around the world have access to life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) medication.

In line with refugee law, the new policy calls for ARVs to be planned for and included in ‘the earliest possible stages of an emergency response to forced displacement”. The strategy will target most elements of the epidemic, including treatment for repatriating refugees, post-exposure prophylaxis in sexual assault cases, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission.

Source: IRIN

Aids-related deaths in South Africa: 2 027 253 at noon on January 24

Debate has been raging for some time about whether people with HIV should start treatment when their CD4 count drops to 350 or 200. A new study shows better results for patients who get an early start.

Patients who start antiretroviral (ARV) therapy when their CD4 count drops to 350 have significantly stronger immune systems six years later than those who start when their CD4 count reaches 200.

This is according to a study of 655 patients conducted by Dr Richard Moore of Johns Hopkins University that is due to be published in the February 15 edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

In South Africa, patients are eligible for ARVs when their CD4 count drops to 200.

Researchers found that, in all patients, increases in CD4 counts levelled off after four years of ARV treatment. After six years, those who had started with CD4 counts of between 201 and 349 now had an average CD4 count of 508. But those who started ARVs with a CD4 count above 350 had an average CD4 count of 829 — which is considered to be normal.

All three groups of patients had significant increases in their CD4 counts for the first four years of ARVs, after which they reached ‘a plateau”, according to the study.

Source: Health-e

Aids-related deaths in South Africa at noon on Wednesday January 17 2007: 2 020 673

Syphilis epidemic: China is suffering its biggest wave of syphilis in more than 50 years as a cocktail of changing sexual mores and weakening public healthcare takes its toll on the world’s most populous nation.

The incidence rate of the sexually transmitted — and occasionally fatal — disease has surged more than 30-fold in less than 10 years, according to a new study published in the Lancet.

Syphilis was almost wiped out in China between 1960 and 1980 thanks to a huge public health campaign. It was one of the proudest boasts of the Communist Party after it took power in 1949 with a promise to wipe out capitalist decadence and disease.

But it has surged back in the wake of economic and social reforms that have undermined the health system and led to a burgeoning sex industry. Because the disease was absent for such a long time, immunities are low but young people are more vulnerable because they are now losing their virginity earlier, marrying later and having more partners than in the past.

‘Syphilis has returned to China with a vengeance. The data demonstrates a syphilis epidemic of such scope and magnitude that it will require terrific effort to intervene,” said lead researcher Myron S Cohen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Chinese academics said their country had stepped up its efforts to counter syphilis and HIV/Aids in recent years, but more needed to be done.

Source: The Guardian