As 1996 began, the five Motsoeneng kids were doing just fine. Their father had a steady income as a truck driver and, with their mother, had managed to build a brick house in Orange Farm. But during that year Aids arrived and ”friends, family, everything, the world itself, changed”, says the second-oldest child, Piet.
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/ 15 December 2006
Another C — circumcision — looks set to be added to the “Abstain, Be Faithful and Condomise” HIV prevention campaigns after conclusive evidence emerged this week that removing a man’s foreskin can halve his chances of catching HIV. Two clinical trials, in Uganda and Kenya, have confirmed previous South African research into the protective power of circumcision.
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/ 24 November 2006
With Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in her seventh week of sick leave, the delicate rapprochement between civil society and the government over HIV/Aids continues against a background of political infighting. Aids activists insist the political wind is blowing firmly towards action and cooperation with civil society.
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/ 9 November 2006
The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has won a high court application for the go-ahead of a clinical trial that will give an anti-retroviral drug to breastfeeding babies, marking another appearance in court for the n-word — nevirapine. The researchers, headed by Professor Jerry Coovadia, plan to give nevirapine or a placebo randomly to about 1Â 100 breastfeeding newborns for a six-month period.
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/ 31 October 2006
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has been attacked for her continued anti-smoking focus when the Aids campaign is in disarray. But recent research has confirmed the devastating impact of smoking on the immune system — including potentially tripling the chances of contracting HIV and halving the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy.
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/ 24 October 2006
Protecting children against tuberculosis (TB) in developing countries may become easier as a result of South African-based research that has found that a simple vaccination technique is as effective as the more complicated method currently recommended. Researchers compared two methods of vaccinating newborn children.
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/ 23 September 2006
The government continued repositioning itself on HIV/Aids this week, extending an olive branch to the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and promising a more vigorous and more inclusive South African National Aids Council (Sanac). But activists and political analysts remain unsure of whether the state’s new self-projection merely reflects a desire to minimise public relations disasters.
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/ 17 September 2006
Four years after the nevirapine-based prevention of mother-to-child transmission programme was introduced, following the Treatment Action Campaign’s watershed court victory over the government, one in 13 children in highly HIV-affected KwaZulu-Natal communities is still thought to be dying of Aids before turning five.
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/ 8 September 2006
The spread of the world’s most lethal TB strain in KwaZuluNatal has triggered calls to consider quarantine and forcible medical treatment for people with drug-resistant strains of the disease. The KwaZulu-Natal strain of extreme drug-resistant TB, XDR TB, is effectively untreatable because it is immune to seven of the nine standard TB drugs available in South Africa.
South Africa is proud to boast that it has the highest number of people on anti-retroviral treatment should be a matter of shame, rather than pride. The state and private sectors have been successful in giving ART to about 220 000 South Africans, but this reflects just 20% of the people thought to need it.