The High-Level Taskforce for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV for Eastern and Southern Africa concluded a week-long political advocacy mission to South Africa by calling for renewed commitment and leadership to protect the health and rights of young women and girls in the country. South Africa’s Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities invited the Taskforce to advocate with the country’s leadership around the critical issues facing women and girls today including teenage pregnancy, gender based-violence, transmission of HIV from mother-to-child, and sex work. In order to address the high rates of maternal mortality in South Africa - 310/100,000 live births - earlier this year, the National Department of Health, spearheaded by the Minister of Health, launched the Campaign for Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA) in South Africa. Some of the key elements of CARMMA is to strengthen women’s access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, especially family planning to prevent new HIV infections and unintended pregnancies, strengthen the health system to provide human resources for maternal and child health and to intensify the management of HIV-positive mothers.
Equity in Health
A new High-Level Taskforce on Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV for Eastern and Southern Africa was launched at the 16th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA). The Taskforce will engage in high-level political advocacy in support of accelerated country actions and monitoring the implementation of the draft Windhoek Declaration for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV, which calls for action in seven key thematic areas including sexual and reproductive health, adopting a multi-stakeholder approach to address violence against women and HIV and the law, gender and HIV. Young women are particularly vulnerable to HIV, accounting for about 70% of young people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The Taskforce members outlined the directions the group will follow to empower women as well as to hold governments accountable to ensure positive policy development and implementation of legal environments to protect women and girls. Participants outlined the need to engage political leadership to challenge harmful cultural norms and laws such as early marriage and wife inheritance. They argued that the involvement of men and boys in the gender equality equation was equally important.
Young children who have two of the world's most deadly infectious diseases--malaria and HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites)--may need to be treated with a more potent antimalarial drug than chloroquine, the most widely available and cheapest treatment for malaria, a new report suggests.
On December 18 the first report was presented from a new study of the prevalence of drug-resistant HIV in U.S. patients in early 1999.1 This study found that somewhere between 50 and 78 percent of these patients (depending on how you count patients whose viral resistance could not be measured) had some degree of reduced susceptibility to at least one antiretroviral. White, gay, middle class, insured patients had the most resistance, on the average, while those with less access to care had less. The national press eagerly picked up that story; and when we got home from the ICAAC conference in Chicago where the preliminary report was presented, we found that people all over the country had heard it -- and little else from the conference. A closer look shows that while the study results are valid (though not as surprising as they might appear), the central messages that carried the press story appear to be misinterpretations -- ones that could have future consequences for society's political will to deal with the HIV epidemic, both in the U.S. and abroad.
The high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Zambia combined with the inconsistent and sometimes limited availability of HIV test kits has prompted the Churches Medical Association of Zambia (CMAZ) to recommend to its member institutions an HIV prioritisation scheme.
As anti-AIDS drugs become available to more South Africans, a growing number of HIV-positive women are choosing to become pregnant in spite of their status. Although it is generally accepted that all women have the right to bear children, society finds it harder to accept when women living with the virus exercise that choice.
Using the mandates of the UN General Assembly Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS in 2001, the UNAIDS Secretariat and Cosponsors collaboratively developed a series of global/ regional and national indicators to measure the global community's progress in reaching the Declaration's targets in line with the Millennium Development Goals. This report, by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS, which presents data from the first use of these indicators, represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of the state of global, regional and national responses on the broad range of challenges posed by HIV/AIDS.
Although a humanitarian crisis had been mitigated in Southern Africa through swift food aid deliveries, a horrifying new disaster was looming in Southern Africa in the form of HIV/AIDS, James Morris, the UN Secretary-General's special envoy for humanitarian needs in Southern Africa has warned. "The impact of HIV/AIDS on this part of the world is enormous and the impact on women and children is devastating," Morris told journalists after a visit to four of the six southern African countries battling critical food shortages affecting over 14 million people.
The United Nations Population Division on Wednesday lowered its estimated world population projections for 2050 by 400 million, largely due to the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and "lower than expected" birthrates. The "World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision" report attributes about half of the decrease to a rising number of deaths due to AIDS-related complications and the other half to the fact that three out of four countries in less-developed regions will have fertility rates below replacement levels by 2050.
With an increasing number of HIV/AIDS patients seeking health care from already over-stretched public sector facilities, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is undermining the quality of care in South Africa's health system. According to The South African Health Review (SAHR) for 2002, published recently by the NGO Health Systems Trust (HST), HIV/AIDS is the "single most important" challenge to improving health care delivery in the country.