The government has thrown a veil of secrecy around the task team appointed to calculate the costs of universal anti-retroviral treatment. The team will report back to the Cabinet at the end of April.

A collective sigh of relief was heard throughout South Africa on April 17 last year when the Cabinet at last acknowledged its programmes would be based on the premise that HIV causes Aids and promised to introduce a national treatment and prevention programme. But health providers throughout South Africa believe the government has failed to keep this promise.

A national prevention and treatment programme for HIV/Aids would save three million lives and cost no more than R18-billion a year by 2015, according to a cost-benefit analysis conducted by the University of Cape Town.

A Free State pathologist is lobbying the government accept an Aids immune booster that is said to alleviate the plight of people living with HIV/Aids.

Africans will be the worst victims of a war in Iraq, according to the Stop the War Campaign. The campaign is a broad alliance of organisations that aim to mobilise South Africans against war in Iraq. Addressing a press conference the coalition announced a mass campaign in opposition to the war.

The revolutionary recommendations in the report by the Satchwell commission into the Road Accident Fund throw open the debate over an overhaul of this fuel levy cash cow. The report recommends that a new parastatal be created to administer the fund.

With final drafting imminent, the controversy-haunted Communal Land Rights Bill remains mired in strong objections from both left and right and overshadowed by threats of violent resistance. The Bill seeks to extend tenure security to occupiers of land under traditional leaders.

What do ordinary rural people — as opposed to loud-mouthed traditional leaders — think of the draft Communal Land Rights Bill? They seem to like it, but worry about how it will be implemented. That was the message of a weekend indaba in Leeufontein township, Limpopo.