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Fight against HIV/AIDS goes hi-tech
Patrick Leeman. 06 August 2004. The Mercury. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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A bold new chapter in the battle to find a solution to the raging HIV/AIDS pandemic was written at the Doris Duke Research Institute at the Nelson R Mandel Medical School of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban this week.
The medical faculty officially opened the Victor Daitz Information Gateway, a hi-tech, computerised library and research facility which is the only one of its kind in Africa.
The new project, which is estimated to have cost R4-million to build, has been designed to become a central information resource for the whole of South Africa, and the African continent, for researchers, scientists and health professionals determined to gain a clearer understanding of HIV/AIDS.
Sam Abrahams, Chairman of the Victor Daitz Foundation, which provided a large proportion of the funding, performed the opening ceremony. Other major donors included the 13th World AIDS Conference held in Durban in 2001, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and the Stella and Paul Lowenstein Trust.
The Victor Daitz Professor in HIV/AIDS Research, Jerry Coovadia, said the opening of the information gateway was an extremely significant development in the search for ways of pinpointing the mysteries behind the complex and enigmatic virus.
He said information technology was still in its infancy in Africa, with the continent having only one percent of the total number of Internet users in the world. Of this figure 80 percent were in South Africa.
Coovadia said he hoped that the new information highway would be able to benefit the scientific and medical community, both at national level and in the rest of the continent, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Interim Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof Malegapuru Makgoba, said the information gateway answered an increasingly urgent need in today's Information Age for a new type of approach to information access and storage.
"We are very excited to be able to take this pioneering step towards supporting the information needs of our scientists and researchers in the highly dynamic field of HIV/AIDS," he said.
"This will allow them to benefit quickly and directly from the experiences of others, not just in South Africa, but also around the world."
Makgoba said that there was little doubt that access to quality information yielded time and cost savings and offered an economic competitive advantage for the university.
Prof Coovadia's speech can be downloaded on the righthand side of this page |
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