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Marina Lacroix

Study cites toll of AIDS policy in South Africa - Print Version - International Herald ... - 0 views

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HIV_AIDS pandemic South-Africa Mbeki

shared by Marina Lacroix on 26 Nov 08 - Cached
  • The document maintained that antiretrovirals were toxic. And it suggested that powerful vested interests — drug companies, governments, scientists — pushed the consensus view of AIDS in a quest for money and power, while peddling centuries-old white racist beliefs that depicted Africans as sexually rapacious.
    • Marina Lacroix
      Marina Lacroix on 26 Nov 08
       
      Reasons why Mbeki did not believe that HIV would exclusively cause AIDS.
  • Jacob Zuma, who is expected to become president after next year's election, himself made a famously questionable remark about AIDS. In his 2006 rape trial, in which he was acquitted of sexually assaulting a family friend, he testified that he sought to reduce his chances of being infected with HIV by taking a shower after sex. Nonetheless, he seems to have more conventional views on the pandemic.
  • They estimated that by 2005, South Africa could have been helping half those in need but had reached only 23 percent. By comparison, Botswana was already providing treatment to 85 percent of those in need, and Namibia to 71 percent.
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  • Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mbeki's's successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies. He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa — the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world's AIDS pandemic — back into the mainstream.
  • A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.
  • The 330,000 South Africans who died for lack of treatment and the 35,000 babies who perished because they were infected with HIV together lost at least 3.8 million years of life, the study concluded.
  • the researchers had based their estimates on conservative assumptions and used a sound methodology
  • South Africa today is home to 5.7 million people who are HIV-positive — more than any other nation, almost one in five adults. More than 900 people a day die here as a result of AIDS, the United Nations estimates.
Marina Lacroix

AIDS prevention for women. - By Amanda Schaffer - Slate Magazine - 0 views

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HIV_AIDS STDs microbicides

shared by Marina Lacroix on 31 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Microbicides have long been high on the wish list of grass-roots activists, who see them as the most promising way to prevent AIDS for heterosexual women at high risk of infection from unfaithful husbands or partners, especially in Asia and Africa.
  • Yet to date, research related to their development represents only 2 percent of all AIDS spending by the National Institutes of Health
  • One mathematical model, which focused on Johannesburg, South Africa, predicted that if 75 percent of area residents were to use a 40-percent-effective microbicide in half of the sexual encounters in which they didn't use condoms, the local incidence of HIV infection would drop by 9 percent. That may not sound like much, but across countries and continents, similar percentages could translate into millions of saved lives.
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  • Microbicides could be a particular boon to married women. While condoms have been successful in slowing the spread of AIDS among commercial sex workers and others, their association with illicit sex makes many long-term couples reluctant to use them.
  • Another appeal is that some microbicides are not contraceptives, which means that women who want to get pregnant won't have to choose between exposing themselves to infection and having kids.
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