CAPE TOWN, 23 January: Activists and doctors Wednesday accused the South African government of backsliding on promises to provide more effective treatment to prevent mothers passing on the AIDS virus to unborn children.
The Treatment Action Campaign said that more than 60.000 babies are infected with HIV yearly in South Africa, most of them in the womb (livmoderen). Many of these could be avoided by improving testing and counseling services for pregnant women and providing HIV-positive women with up-to-date therapy.
At the moment, many clinics in South Africa use just one anti-AIDS drug nevirapine for HIV positive pregnant women, even though the World Health Organization recommends a drug cocktail.
– Pediatric HIV (hiv hos børn) has almost been eradicated in many countries in the world, said Francois Venter, head of the southern African HIV Clinicians Society.
– Poorer countries with far worse infrastructure than South Africa have made significant progress in decreasing transmission. In South Africa, a middle income country, the fact that HIV-infected women have access to a substandard regimen for protection of their children is a sad reflection on our health system, he said.
HIV is now the commonest cause of death among pregnant women in the country and almost one in three pregnant women are HIV positive, according to the clinicians society. Because of the stigma (fordommene) associated with AIDS, some pregnant women refuse to take an AIDS test. Many do not get the chance.
An estimated 5,4 million South Africans have the AIDS virus – the highest total in the world. Nearly 1.000 people die EACH DAY of the disease and the same number become newly infected.
Medical workers say they are particularly frustrated because preventing mother-to-child transmission of the disease is relatively straightforward.
– HIV in children is a preventable disease and we have known it is a preventable disease for more than 10 years, said Tammy Meyers, a pediatrician (børnelæge) at South Africas biggest hospital, Baragwanath.
The Soweto hospital sees about 90 HIV infected children a month and many die before they get treatment, Meyers said.
The government promised last November to overhaul its mother-to-child transmission programs by the end of the year to bring them into line with international standards. But the Treatment Action campaign accused Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang of stalling.
Tshabalala-Msimang is widely dubbed Dr. Garlic (hvidløg) because of her espousal of (tilslutning til) nutritional remedies for people with AIDS. She has long been accused of frustrating (forhale) provision of antiretroviral drugs.
Kilde: The Push Journal
