AIDS – praag.org

Large HIV trail in Africa fails spectacularly

The spectacular failure of a large clinical trial of H.I.V.-prevention methods in Africa — and the elaborate deceptions employed by the women in it — have opened an ethical debate about how to run such studies in poor countries and have already changed the design of some that are now underway.

Scientists who conduct clinical trials are now testing participants’ blood more often and holding group discussions to quell rumors and urge participants to take their medications diligently.

As a result of the failed trial, scientists are arguing vigorously about the extent to which it is ethical to pay participants for their time, and whether results of trials that do so can be trusted.

The trial — known by the acronym Voice, for Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epidemic — was abruptly halted by independent safety monitors because it was not working: Women who were given pills or vaginal gels containing anti-H.I.V. drugs were becoming infected at roughly the same rate as women who were given placebos.

The study, paid for by the National Institutes of Health, was supposed to definitively establish whether pre-exposure prophylaxis — the use of small amounts of anti-AIDS drugs to prevent infection — would work for African women. It enrolled 5,029 women at 15 clinics in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda, and cost $94 million.

In Africa, where there are 1.6 million new infections each year, women are at particularly high risk: About 60 percent of Africans living with H.I.V. are women, and teenage girls are far more likely to be infected than teenage boys.

The strategy has worked well for gay American men and Thai drug users who took their pills daily, but not for African women.

When parts of the trial had to be stopped prematurely in 2011, scientists suspected it was failing because some women were not using their gel or pills, even though they claimed they were and produced empty bottles and applicators to prove it.

But all blood samples had been stored for later testing, so the researchers had no idea how pervasive the problem was. The final analysis, published on Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine, said that about 70 percent of the women actually had no tenofovir, the main study drug, in their blood, even though about 90 percent had claimed they were taking their pills or using the gel, and counts of empty pill bottles and used gel applicators suggested that 86 percent had been taken or used.

Ariane van der Straten, a researcher who led follow-up interviews with over 300 participants, found that many admitted to discarding pills or pouring gel down the toilet.

Source:NYT

Black Alabama pastor with AIDS sleeps with church members

A Black Alabama pastor is being sued after admitting that he had sex with multiple female members of his congregation. Worse, however, is that he declined to inform them he had AIDS.

The shocking news was revealed by the pastor himself, Reverend Juan Demetrius McFarland of the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church. Starting in September this year, McFarland began recounting to parishioners – through his sermons – the fact that he tested positive for HIV back in 2003, going on to note that he has had AIDS since 2008.

This news alone was not enough to attract calls for McFarland to step aside. In fact, most black members of the Church supported the pastor and initiated efforts to help in in whatever way they could, according to a report by local NBC affiliate WSFA.

However, McFarland dropped a bombshell just a few Sundays ago, when he announced – again, in a sermon – that he’d had sex with women and did not tell them of the fact that he had AIDS. In another sermon, the pastor admitted he was abusing illegal drugs, the Associated Press reported.

“He concealed from the church that he had knowingly engaged in adultery in the church building with female members of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church while knowingly having AIDS,” Church Deacon Nathan Williams Jr. said to WSFA.

For the Church’s deacons, that was the last straw. On October 5, they voted overwhelmingly to fire McFarland, though the pastor of 23 years insisted he would not step down. With McFarland remaining defiant, the deacons filed a lawsuit asking a judge to prevent the pastor from working and hand over control of the Church.

In their lawsuit, the deacons claim McFarland practiced “debauchery, sinfulness, hedonism, sexual misconduct, dishonesty, thievery and rejection of the Ten Commandments.”

McFarland could also face misdemeanor charges if it’s true that he knowingly spread a sexually transmitted disease.

“Our moves are going to come directly from counsel. We want peace and we want to do things right, legally,” Williams said to WSFA. “We are not looking to hurt him. We are looking to get the Church back. That’s our theme: Get the Church back. We want the Church back. That’s it.”

For his part, McFarland was dismissive of the lawsuit, telling the AP his attorney would be looking closely at it before he takes his next step. Still, the minister indicated he would not be leaving his post. He has even replaced the locks on the church doors and changed bank account numbers in order to evade financial consequences.

“I will command the pulpit from this day forward,” he said.

Despite previous support from churchgoers, attendance at McFarland’s sermons has dwindled considerably. This past Sunday, just 50 people attended the service – usually, there are 170 people every week.

Source: RT

Doctor that discovered ebola fears ‘unimaginable tragedy’

I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa… that really is the apocalyptic scenario

Peter Piot was a researcher at a lab in Antwerp when a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had fallen mysteriously ill in Zaire. Now, the Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warns, “around June it became clear to me there was something different about this outbreak. I began to get really worried.

“It is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus… There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die… I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa… that really is the apocalyptic scenario.”

The Guardian spoke to Piot.

After Yambuku, you spent the next 30 years of your professional life devoted to combating Aids. But now Ebola has caught up to you again. American scientists fear that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately become infected. Was such an epidemic to be expected?

No, not at all. On the contrary, I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to Aids or malaria, didn’t present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. At about the same time, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières sounded the alarm. We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried.

Why did WHO react so late?

On the one hand, it was because their African regional office isn’t staffed with the most capable people but with political appointees. And the headquarters in Geneva suffered large budget cuts that had been agreed to by member states. The department for haemorrhagic fever and the one responsible for the management of epidemic emergencies were hit hard. But since August WHO has regained a leadership role.

There is actually a well-established procedure for curtailing Ebola outbreaks: isolating those infected and closely monitoring those who had contact with them.

How could a catastrophe such as the one we are now seeing even happen?

I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. In all of Liberia, for example, there were only 51 doctors in 2010, and many of them have since died of Ebola.

The fact that the outbreak began in the densely populated border region between Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia …

… also contributed to the catastrophe. Because the people there are extremely mobile, it was much more difficult than usual to track down those who had had contact with the infected people. Because the dead in this region are traditionally buried in the towns and villages they were born in, there were highly contagious Ebola corpses travelling back and forth across the borders in pickups and taxis. The result was that the epidemic kept flaring up in different places.

For the first time in its history, the virus also reached metropolises such as Monrovia and Freetown. Is that the worst thing that can happen?

In large cities – particularly in chaotic slums – it is virtually impossible to find those who had contact with patients, no matter how great the effort. That is why I am so worried about Nigeria as well. The country is home to mega-cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt, and if the Ebola virus lodges there and begins to spread, it would be an unimaginable catastrophe.

Have we completely lost control of the epidemic?

I have always been an optimist and I think that we now have no other choice than to try everything, really everything. It’s good that the United States and some other countries are finally beginning to help. But Germany or even Belgium, for example, must do a lot more. And it should be clear to all of us: This isn’t just an epidemic any more. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. We don’t just need care personnel, but also logistics experts, trucks, jeeps and foodstuffs. Such an epidemic can destabilise entire regions. I can only hope that we will be able to get it under control. I really never thought that it could get this bad.

What can really be done in a situation when anyone can become infected on the streets and, like in Monrovia, even the taxis are contaminated?

We urgently need to come up with new strategies. Currently, helpers are no longer able to care for all the patients in treatment centres. So caregivers need to teach family members who are providing care to patients how to protect themselves from infection to the extent possible. This on-site educational work is currently the greatest challenge. Sierra Leone experimented with a three-day curfew in an attempt to at least flatten out the infection curve a bit. At first I thought: “That is totally crazy.” But now I wonder, “why not?” At least, as long as these measures aren’t imposed with military power.

A three-day curfew sounds a bit desperate.

Yes, it is rather medieval. But what can you do? Even in 2014, we hardly have any way to combat this virus.

Do you think we might be facing the beginnings of a pandemic?

There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die. But an outbreak in Europe or North America would quickly be brought under control. I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa. It would only take one of them to become infected, travel to India to visit relatives during the virus’s incubation period, and then, once he becomes sick, go to a public hospital there. Doctors and nurses in India, too, often don’t wear protective gloves. They would immediately become infected and spread the virus.

The virus is continually changing its genetic makeup. The more people who become infected, the greater the chance becomes that it will mutate …

… which might speed its spread. Yes, that really is the apocalyptic scenario. Humans are actually just an accidental host for the virus, and not a good one. From the perspective of a virus, it isn’t desirable for its host, within which the pathogen hopes to multiply, to die so quickly. It would be much better for the virus to allow us to stay alive longer.

Could the virus suddenly change itself such that it could be spread through the air?

Like measles, you mean? Luckily that is extremely unlikely. But a mutation that would allow Ebola patients to live a couple of weeks longer is certainly possible and would be advantageous for the virus. But that would allow Ebola patients to infect many, many more people than is currently the case.

But that is just speculation, isn’t it?

Certainly. But it is just one of many possible ways the virus could change to spread itself more easily. And it is clear that the virus is mutating.

You and two colleagues wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal supporting the testing of experimental drugs. Do you think that could be the solution?

Patients could probably be treated most quickly with blood serum from Ebola survivors, even if that would likely be extremely difficult given the chaotic local conditions. We need to find out now if these methods, or if experimental drugs like ZMapp, really help. But we should definitely not rely entirely on new treatments. For most people, they will come too late in this epidemic. But if they help, they should be made available for the next outbreak.

Testing of two vaccines is also beginning. It will take a while, of course, but could it be that only a vaccine can stop the epidemic?

I hope that’s not the case. But who knows? Maybe.

In Zaire during that first outbreak, a hospital with poor hygiene was responsible for spreading the illness. Today almost the same thing is happening. Was Louis Pasteur right when he said: “It is the microbes who will have the last word”?

Of course, we are a long way away from declaring victory over bacteria and viruses. HIV is still here; in London alone, five gay men become infected daily. An increasing number of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. And I can still see the Ebola patients in Yambuku, how they died in their shacks and we couldn’t do anything except let them die. In principle, it’s still the same today.

Extended free ARV’s to millions will cost 1 billion more

An extra R1-billion would be needed to extend ARV treatment, bringing the total HIV/Aids budget to R13-billion, the minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi said.

“People like asking me whether the country can afford it. The answer is: Can we afford not to? Here is a disease that is blocking development in our country and we want to bring it to an end. That means we need to spend money and we will do so.”

HIV-positive people with a CD4 count of 500, likely to be still relatively healthy, will for the first time qualify for government-supplied antiretroviral medication from next year.

Motsoaledi announced Wednesday that an additional 2million people with HIV will be put on treatment in the next three years.

About 2.5million South Africans are already being treated with antiretrovirals.

The inclusion of those with a higher CD4 count – the count is a measure of the extent to which their immunity has been compromised – is in line with World Health Organisation recommendations.

Source: timeslive.co.za

John Kerry, Zampolit for gay rights

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday sounded like the Zampolit for Africa when he likened new anti-gay legislation in Uganda that imposes harsh penalties for homosexuality to anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa.

The Zampolit is the Communist political commissar charged with taking “active measures” to ensure thought control. The politruk (Russian term) committed to the civilian control of the military, appeared during the October Revolution. Political commissars were part of the the Red Army that remained in the Soviet Army.

The United States spends millions on military training in Uganda.

“You could change the focus of this legislation to black or Jewish and you could be in 1930s Germany or you could be in 1950s-1960s apartheid South Africa,” Kerry told a group of reporters. “It was wrong there egregiously in both places and it is wrong here,” he added.

Strangely, Kerry forgot to mention that racial segregation in the US, lasted well beyond the 1960’s to the 1970’s.

Most Americans believe segregation leads to negative outcomes across American communities with higher rates of violent crimes, and lower levels of wellbeing. Across American communities, some argue, segregation is a key determinant of inequality.

Bankrupt black cities in the US like Detroit have borne this out. Clearly racial mixing and desegregation have thus been promoted to disguise black crime rates in the country.

The American experiment in South Africa is a complete disaster, however. Crime rates have soared since the ANC took over in 1994 with the assistance of Britain and the US.

Kerry said the legislation signed by President Yoweri Museveni on Monday was “atrocious” and expressed concern at mounting discrimination against gays in 78 countries around the world.

Discrimination against gays dim in comparison to child rape and farm murders in South Africa, despite efforts by certain foreign-funded NGO’s and the SAPS to camouflage the scourges. The American Secretary of State either is not aware of this, or does not care.

Homosexuality is a taboo in almost all African countries and illegal in 37, including in Uganda where it has been criminalized since British colonial rule by popular demand.

Yet Kerry denied that it was an “African problem”. “This anti-gay movement is obviously bubbling up in various places around the world; it is not just an African problem, it’s a global problem, and we are wrestling with it and we are going to as we go forward.”

The term “going foward” is a much used expression of the Zampolit.

Uganda launched a public awareness campaign earlier that led to a sharp reduction in the AIDS rate.

“What is happening in Uganda is atrocious and it presents all of us with an enormous challenge because LGBT rights are human rights and the signing of this anti-homosexuality law is flat out morally wrong,” Kerry said.

The State Department’s annual global human rights report will highlight the issue when it is released on Thursday and Kerry said a gathering of U.S. ambassadors in Washington would discuss ways to deal with rising prejudice against homosexuals.

The gay theme is very popular amongst Anglo-American elites. A former French prime minister Edith Cresson suggested that one in four British men may be gay.

“It’s a question of education, and I consider it something of a weakness,” Cresson said at the time.

She passed similarly harsh judgments on American and German men.

A soldier in the style of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

by Ilana Mercer

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Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ “Duty,” a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of “evening sessions” during which he’d write condolence letters “to the families of service members killed in action.” There “probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,” he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became “on the strain on our troops and on their families.” After all, “they’d been at war for 10 years.” “My highest priority,” he averred in an interview with NPR, was “trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,” and expressing “concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.”

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or “save” another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. The former Israeli prime minister died on Jan. 11, after languishing in a vegetative state for 8 years.

Seared in my mind as a child growing up in Israel is a 1973 image of the late Ariel Sharon. He is on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt, head bandaged because of an injury sustained in combat. What is he doing? Winning. Sharon was beating back an enemy that came close to vanquishing Israel.

Ariel Sharon led his men into battle and won the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli government and the intelligence failed miserably. He himself had said that “his greatest military success came during that war, during which he surrounded Egypt’s Third Army and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men over the Suez Canal, a turning point.”

Had Sharon himself not performed military miracles, who knows if Israelis, myself included, would have survived? How many Americans can point to a leader who had actually saved their lives, rather than send other men to die in foreign lands, and then propagandize his countrymen about having fought for their freedoms?

As a Special-Forces commander, Sharon was on the front—and in front of his men—performing daring assaults that saved Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Pugnacious and tenacious, “Arik” Sharon was nothing if not controversial. Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was, nevertheless, a soldier in the style of “Stonewall” Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter, to whom he and the Likudniks were often compared.

Agree or disagree with the methods and politics of this titanic personality—it is unarguable that Sharon’s overriding concern was with the survival and security of the Jewish state: he saw himself as bearing a “historic responsibility” for “the fate of the Jewish people.” By contrast, Bush’s Wilsonian, global missionary movement to rid the world of “evildoers” related not even tangentially to the future and safety of the American people.

Unlike George Bush the internationalist, “Arik” Sharon was a fierce nationalist, who put his country and its people first.

As with so many of our military men—cast adrift by the policies of Rome-on-the-Potomac—Mr. Gates would be less of a mess had he, too, been able to lead his men into wars of necessity, instead of charging headlong into unjust “wars of choice.”

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Talking with the Black Noise guys

by Lin Sampson

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A man called Michael Blum turned up in our street, staying in the house opposite. He is a French-speaking Israeli who lives in Vienna. He said he was doing a “project” on the house and the area. He had a grant from somewhere and asked if he could come and talk to me. He was a short, energetic little mesomorph who arrived and immediately set up video equipment – something I was not expecting.

I remember thinking at what a disadvantage I was as I shrunk into the sofa like a small pile of sand and he asked me all the expected questions, slowly building to what he really wanted to ask. Would the people who live in the house have been able to live there during the years of apartheid? And what had I thought when they first moved in? I said, “noise”, which is always my horror. I explained that I had had meningitis and it had damaged cranial nerves that amplified sound in my head. Busy little Mr Blum video-ed away.

He then organised a sort of halfhearted party on a patch of lawn that abuts the street, which he importantly called “The Green Patch Party”. There were some breakdancers, some students, a few peripatetic vagrants whom we had never seen before – and of course Mr Blum batting about with a video camera. Mr Blum went away and our street returned to its normal old slightly low-rent atmosphere. However, searching through the Internet for something, I came across Michael Blum’s name again as being the author of something called “Very Real Time”, his project on 17 Aandbloem Street and there I was – as usual – the old colonial racially biased person.

He described the flaky party on the grass as becoming, “A milestone in Cape Town’s partying history”.

“It aimed,” wrote Blum, in his lefty join-the-numbers prose with its self-congratulatory subtext, at “squatting” the patch of grass in front of the house. Well thank you Mr Blum, we as residents in the area, have spent a long time trying to “unsquat” the grass in front of our houses.

He went on to say, “The appropriation of the small piece of land in front of the house can be seen as a natural extension of the private sphere”.

This sort of half-baked thinking, this lauding of the underdog, this scream of ecstasy over anything disadvantaged, ill, poor, mad or homeless and this thoughtless beating down of anyone who earns a living by actually going to work is big business in the art world of Europe. Grants can be got with a flick of the finger, if the projects come sashed with kneejerk words like Aids, apartheid, Robben Island.

Mr Blum is a true journeyman of this type of thinking; his other work is a “book specifically designed for waiting rooms”, which purports to be “following the visual paradigm of loss and exploring related issues through diverse imagery”.

In South Africa we have always been victims of a foreign eye, often attached to a camera, filtering across our lives with ease. Many of us have given up time to try to explain this country; few of us have been rewarded. And the harder we tried to explain, the more subtle the thought, the easier the whole thing was to misunderstand. When I said to Mr Blum that whenever I saw new neighbours I was worried about noise, he conveniently saw it as racial, because what would his principals think if he came back without some white bogeyman?

His report states, “Lin Sampson, despite her political opinions, sat with the Black Noise guys and talked with them”. Once in the thick of apartheid, a British TV station asked to interview me. They took me to someone else’s house and posed me beside a pool with a drink with a little umbrella in it. It appeared with a voice-over that went, “While Lin Sampson sits beside her pool sipping a drink, her maid lives less than 5km away in a cardboard box”.

I didn’t even have a maid. But the real irony of Mr Blum’s essay is that until he turned up we were all living together quite happily.

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Lin Sampson is the doyenne of South African columnists and the author of the collection Now You’ve Gone ‘n Killed Me (2005).

SA teens prefer unsafe sex

Most teenagers in Gauteng admit to preferring unsafe sex, the provincial social development department has found.

Briefing the media on its study “Factors associated with teenage pregnancy in Gauteng province”, social development MEC Nandi Mayathula-Khoza said teen pregnancies were a problem that could not be ignored.

“Yes, girls who fall pregnant have a right to continue with school. This issue, however, contributes to the level of unemployment, considering the girls who drop out of school due to pregnancy.”

Experimentation with sex, and factors such as having multiple sexual partners and partners of disparate ages, had to be discouraged, Mayathula-Khoza said.

The study, part of a national survey, was conducted over five weeks at schools. More than 500 pupils between the ages of 13 and 18 filled in questionnaires, and 19 focus groups, consisting of 10 to 12 pupils, were formed.

The Department of Basic Education estimates that 94000 schoolgirls became pregnant during 2011.

Just over 1600 pregnancies were reported at Mpumalanga schools in the whole of 2012 but by May this year 1 564 pupils were reportedly pregnant .

The Gauteng department of health found that 4217 of 1040760 pupils in the province became pregnant in 2011, compared with 4874 of 953170 pupils three years earlier.

But Mayathula-Khoza said the reduction in the number of pregnancies should not stop the province from taking further action.

Earlier this year Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi lambasted older men who lured girls into having sex for money.

He said girls were four to eight times more likely to be infected with HIV than boys of the same age.

The national department found that 28% of schoolgirls countrywide were HIV-positive, whereas only 4% of boys were infected with the virus.

The DA’s Gauteng education spokesman, Khume Ramulifho, attributed the prevalence of teenage pregnancies to a lack of practical education.

“Children are taught about life orientation at school but, though they might pass with flying colours, the problem does not seem to disappear.” – timeslive.co.za

USA has spent $3.2 billion on South Africa’s AIDS programme

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday signed a new deal supporting efforts to fight AIDS in South Africa, which has the world’s biggest population of people with HIV.

“South Africa and the entire region has a brighter and healthier and more secure future,” she said while visiting a clinic in the Cape Town township of Delft.

“Even as we take a moment to say ‘well done’, we cannot make the mistake of thinking that our job is done,” she said. “The disease is still very dangerous.”

The United States has spent $3.2 billion since 2004 supporting South Africa’s fight against AIDS. The new five-year agreement gives South Africa’s government more control over the spending.

“Some people may hear ‘South Africa is in the lead’ and think that it means that the US is bowing out,” Clinton said. “Let me say this clearly: the US is not going anywhere.”

“The partnership is changing for the better,” she said. “Our goal is no new patients — zero.”

The agreement highlights South Africa’s shift from an international pariah on AIDS, under former president Thabo Mbeki, who refused to believe the scientific evidence that AIDS is caused by a virus — to a celebrated one.

Now the country runs the world’s largest AIDS treatment programme, with more than 1.3 million people receiving drugs, out of a total infected population of 5.6 million.

The rate of newborns catching the disease from their mothers during childbirth has fallen from 8 percent in 2008 to 2.7 percent last year. – SAPA

Fewer South African babies infected with HIV

A slightly higher proportion of babies were saved from HIV infection in 2011 than in the previous year, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said on Thursday.

“It has proven that putting mothers and infants on treatment early on really works,” Motsoaledi told media in Johannesburg.

An estimated 104,000 babies out of 117,000 (89 percent) were saved from HIV infection in 2010.

In 2011, another 3000 babies were saved to increase the proportion to 91 percent of 117,000 babies.

This was established by research done by the Medical Research Council on the effectiveness of mother-to-child transmission programmes on babies aged four to six weeks.

The figures are based on the assumption that 32.2 percent of live births were HIV exposed and that 30 percent of HIV-exposed babies would be HIV-infected by eight weeks if there was no intervention.

Motsoaledi said it was particularly pleasing that the biggest drop in HIV transmissions was in KwaZulu-Natal, which had the highest prevalence of HIV/Aids.

At this rate, South Africa should be on course to achieve the United Nations target of eliminating new HIV infections among children by 2015. – Sapa