Cheaper antiretrovirals to treat AIDS in South Africa

Life in the time of antiretrovirals in South Africa.

It was our worst nightmare coming true. A new disease striking people in the prime of their lives characterised by gruesome and prolonged suff ering and spread through the very behaviours that often defi ne us as human beings. AIDS was stealing lives, livelihoods, and even love from our planet. The only people doing well during the AIDS pandemic seemed to be the coffi n makers, who found their ...

Cheaper HIV/AIDS drugs coming.

Identifying deaths from AIDS in South Africa.

OBJECTIVE To quantify the HIV/AIDS deaths misclassified to AIDS-related conditions in South Africa. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of vital registration data. METHODS Cause-specific death rates for 1996 and 2000-2001 were calculated using vital registration cause-of-death profiles applied to a model (ASSA2000) estimate of total mortality rates by age and sex. The difference in the age-specif...

Improving access to antiretrovirals in rural South Africa - a call to action.

South Africa (SA) already has the world’s biggest antiretroviral (ARV) programme. With the introduction of extended criteria for initiating ARVs, the National Department of Health (NDoH) wishes to increase the number of people on ARVs by around two million over the next 2 years. Adoption of a chronic disease management model, with extended task shifting, decentralisation and new approaches to d...

From “Rights” to “Ritual”: AIDS Activism in South Africa

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the “near death” exper...