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New HIV/AIDS plan a 'milestone'
Daily News Reporters. 15 March 2007. Daily News. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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The United Nations and HIV/AIDS lobby groups gave their seal of approval on Wednesday to a new five-year programme by the government designed to halve the incidence of HIV infections.
UNAids' regional coordinator, Mbulawa Mugabe, said the latest plan was an "important milestone" in the fight against the disease in a country where an estimated 5,5 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.
He commended South Africa for raising the bar by setting a 50 percent target in reducing the infection by 2011.
Black South Africans were six times more likely to get infected with the HIV virus than other race groups, the Health Department told an HIV/AIDS conference in Johannesburg yesterday.
"In 2005 blacks were found to be the most affected - six to seven times higher than non-Africans," the department's head of HIV/AIDS, Dr Nomonde Xundu, told a conference on the National Strategic Plan for HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections 2007-2011.
Informal urban dwellers were twice as likely to contract the virus as formal urban dwellers, and women were three times more likely than men to contract it, she said.
Xundu, one of the compilers of the plan, was presenting it to government, civil society and business representatives.
One of the goals of the plan is to halve new HIV infections by 2011. The programme contains target pledges to provide care for 80 percent of sufferers and their families in a country with the second-highest incidence of HIV in the world.
Acting Health Minister, Jeff Radebe, said a lot of progress had been made through implementing the 2000-2005 plan. A total of 245 670 people were now enrolled for antiretroviral treatment at 293 facilities countrywide.
Problems that remained were a shortage and uneven distribution of health workers.
The most enthusiastic response came from the Congress of SA Trade Unions.
This plan is a radical challenge. As civil society we plan to support it and add to its call," said the federation's general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi.
Business Unity SA president Patrice Motsepe said it was important that business not only consider profits.
He called for anti-AIDS messages to take into account the culture and background of their recipients.
Deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said that in order to be effective, the fight against HIV/AIDS needed to deal with poverty, underdevelopment and violence against women. A comprehensive strategy to create and retain jobs was needed, she said.
Sipho Mthathi, general secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa's largest anti-AIDS lobby, said "the plan covered most aspects of prevention that were missing in the fight against the disease".
David Allen, a senior HIV/AIDS programme officer in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest funders of anti-AIDS programmes on the continent, said the plan can be used as a model by other African nations.
The chairperson of the SA Medical Association, Dr Kgosi Letlape, on Wednesday hit out at the sexual behaviour of men saying HIV/AIDS was a disease of men, spread by men.
He said the fight could not be won unless the issue of men as "vectors" of the disease was addressed, otherwise everyone was just "pussyfooting" around the issue. |
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