A key ingredient to ensuring our response to the AIDS and TB epidemics is effective, is having a workable plan. To that end, consultants and experts are working furiously to make sure South Africa has a new National Strategic Plan to take us through to 2022.
Address presented at a session entitled ‛South Africa’s National Sex Worker HIV Plan: Are you coming?’ at the 2016 International AIDS Conference in Durban.
The world spent less on tuberculosis (TB) research in 2015 than it did in 2009. This decrease in spending does not track a similar decline in TB incidence or mortality.
Former deputy Chairperson of the SA National AIDS Council (SANAC) and long-time AIDS activist Mark Heywood’s plea to Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa as we craft our next response to the epidemic.
At the end of this year South Africa’s big plan to fight HIV and tuberculosis comes to an end. The National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and STIs 2012 – 2016 will be replaced by the 2017 – 2021 NSP. It is vital that the new NSP avoids the mistakes of the past and fully incorporates new scientific evidence.
Welcome to the first edition of Spotlight. Spotlight is the new identity of the NSP Review. You can follow Spotlight on twitter at @SpotlightNSP, Facebook at Spotlight NSP or sign up for our electronic newsletter at www.SpotlightNSP.co.za.
HIV changed our society at a time when South Africa needed no distraction as it battled to rebuild a nation post-apartheid., write Professor Glenda Gray and Professor James A. McIntyre.
Professor Hoosen Coovadia writes that he was thrust into the vortex of International AIDS Society’s 13th International AIDS conference in 2000 as chairperson by close colleagues Professor Quarraisha Abdool-Karim and Dr Gustaaf Wolvaardt, presumably due to the absence of any suitable alternatives, because of his academic record (such as it was at that time) and his leadership roles in the struggle for freedom.
With over 3 000 people dying from HIV infection every single day and 5 500 becoming newly infected, AIDS is not over by any means, writes Professor Peter Piot.
As the global HIV community returns to South Africa for the International AIDS Conference, there is no better time to take stock of the progress the country has made, write Dr Fareed Abdullah and Kanya Ndaki.
It has been almost 35 years since AIDS was identified. Thirty-five long years, since the disquieting realisation that young men in North America, in the prime of their lives, were dying from a hitherto unknown virus.
Professor Francois Venter writes that it is strange to think of the progress we have made as a country since 2004, when the South African antiretroviral (ARV) programme rollout was started. A full version of the special edition of Spotlight will be released during the International AIDS Conference in Durban which starts on 17 July. This is an article which will be published in Spotlight.