Belinda Beresford

Renaissance Medical Scheme was placed under curatorship last week after a report showed it is insolvent and more than R30million in the red. The industry regulatory authority, the Council for Medical Schemes, applied for the scheme to be put under curatorship to protect its 30 000 beneficiaries.

A trumpeter, a combat training specialist and a personnel clerk took on the South African National Defence Force in court last week over the military’s policy on HIV-positive soldiers. The three, together with the South African Security Forces Union, applied to have lifted an effective blanket ban on the employment of people with HIV and the promotion of soldiers who are already HIV-positive.

The battle for control of the R70-billion private healthcare industry has been ratcheted up as the regulator of medical schemes turns to the Constitutional Court to define its jurisdiction and the minister of health releases draft price-control regulation.

South Africa’s inadequate public sector anti-HIV treatment has been highlighted again this week with the release of expert guidelines on antiretroviral therapy in the region. The guidelines released by the Southern African HIV Clinicians’ Society are likely to be adopted by the private sector.

A reticent, opaque man who seldom reveals what he is thinking or feeling is how author Jonny Steinberg describes the central character in his latest book, <i>Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey through a Great Epidemic</i> (Jonathan Ball). Belinda Beresford meets Steinberg.

Thousands of South African nurses are doing it for themselves when it comes to extending their skills and training — with the aid of locally developed distance learning courses. The Perinatal Education Programme was set up in 1989 by Professor Dave Woods, then at the University of Cape Town, and colleagues who wanted to improve the skills of healthcare workers caring for pregnant women.

One in five of the tens of thousands of young children who die each year in South Africa probably suffocate to death, drowning from pus-filled lungs as a result of pneumonia. Yet more than two-thirds of these deaths could be prevented if all children under five were given a vaccine that protects against the most common bacterial cause of pneumonia — the pneumococcus.

Finance Minister Trevor Manuel highlighted under-capacity in the struggling healthcare system in this week’s budget. His department is expecting the number of people who will receive HIV/Aids treatment through the state system merely to double in the next three years.

Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future, said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. His quote is particularly appropriate looking at the future impact of HIV/Aids in South Africa because the country faces a situation as yet unknown in human history.

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.

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.

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.

Top South African artists playing in the second "Rage for the Revolution" concert in October are being approached by sponsor Levi Strauss to go public about having had a recent HIV test. The names of the artists, from genres such as kwaito, hip-hop and reggae, will be released once negotiations have been concluded.

A R10 000-plus, 21-year insurance policy, with odds of 100 000 to one against a payout, may not seem a good bet — yet 3 000 South African parents have taken the gamble. That’s the number of people who have chosen to store stem cells from their child’s umbilical cord in case he or she needs them for medical treatment over the next two decades.

Leaders in Lesotho have embarked on a revolutionary strategy to reduce the spread and the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic: test everyone for the virus. It is hoped this will counter the widespread human tendency to consider HIV to be someone else’s problem — confirmed by a South African survey released last year.

Come up and see my coloured toilet rolls on a string, said the southern grey hornbill to his mate. That wasn’t all he was offering. The Johannesburg Zoo had recently installed a state of the art hornbill love nest on a pole. Tricky to get there –at least until they installed a ladder. It made a hornbill feel, well … horny.

Edwin Cameron, the HIV-positive Supreme Court of Appeal judge, has called for HIV/Aids to be treated as a "normal" disease in order to counteract the stigma surrounding the virus, and to encourage people to be tested and to seek treatment. In a speech that is already stirring heated debate, Cameron suggested that in some circumstances pre-test counselling should be dispensed with.

The Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, distanced herself from a controversial herbal "remedy" for HIV/Aids that is taking KwaZulu-Natal by storm, and which she had reportedly endorsed. Ubhejane Immune Booster hit the news recently when Tshabalala-Msimang reportedly recommended use of the substance.

If the lethal form of the H5N1 bird flu currently spreading across Asia and Europe mutates to become a specifically human killer, it is thought that a third of South Africans could become sick, 8% of whom could require hospitalisation. This means that more than a million could die within a year, and the country could virtually be closed down.

Researchers at Johannesburg’s Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital are homing in on the link between HIV and the genital herpes virus, which is thought to infect more than half of South Africa’s adults. HIV-positive people who have herpes are more likely to develop Aids more rapidly, and to transmit both viruses.

The intriguing tale of Zimbabwe’s apparent incremental victory over HIV continues, with the United Nations saying that the course of the disease in South Africa’s troubled neighbour appears to have been altered. In a UNAids report released recently, the organisation says Zimbabwe has seen a fall in the prevalence, or level of existing HIV infections, over the past few years.

In the mystery of the Scot and the disappearing HIV, it could be the vitamins that did it. But the culprit is far more likely to be an inaccurate blood test or a hidden viral infection. Recently, a 25-year-old Scot living in London said in paid interviews with two British tabloids that he was "the first in the world to be cured of HIV".