Posts tagged South Africa
Getting Ahead of the Wave of New Infections
Khayelitsha is a large township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa with a population of over 500,000 and one of the highest burdens of both HIV and TB in the world. An estimated 16% of the adult population is HIV-positive. MSF began providing ART in Khayelitsha in May 2001, and today supports ART provision to more than 17,000 people.
There are indications that as treatment has been scaled up in Khayelitsha, new HIV infections have decreased. An analysis of HIV prevalence data among pregnant women shows that the proportion of HIV positive pregnant women attending antenatal care had risen from 15.4% in 1999 to 31.4% in 2008. By 2010, that percentage had fallen to 26.3%. While other factors including deaths, out-migration, and behavior change may have played a role in this reduction, ART scale up is considered to be the strongest contributing factor in reducing new infections.
Learn more in our special report, “Getting Ahead of the Wave: Lessons for the Next Decade of the AIDS Response”
2008
Xenophobic Violence Uproots Tens of Thousands in South Africa
MSF provides medical assistance to thousands of Zimbabweans and other foreign African nationals when angry gangs attack them, killing 62 people and sending 100,000 more in search of safety. MSF speaks out against the inadequate response of both the South African government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Learn more about MSF’s history at our website.
Photo: South Africa 2008 © Erin Trieb
A new diagnostic test for tuberculosis that was endorsed by the World Health Organization in late 2010 could well be a game-changer in the international response to a disease that kills nearly two million people each year. In a recent interview, Dr. Francis Varaine, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) expert on TB, discusses the potential impact of this new test, which greatly improves the detection of drug-resistant TB, and how it will affect the need for more reliable and better treatment.
Today is World Tuberculosis Day, learn more here.
Photo: South Africa © Jose Cendon
2000
The HIV/AIDS Pandemic
MSF starts providing antiretroviral therapy to people living with HIV/AIDS in Thailand, and the following year opens projects in Cambodia, Cameroon, Guatemala, Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa, primarily using generic antiretroviral medicines.
Learn more about MSF’s history at our website.
Photo: Guatemala 2002 © Juan Carlos Tomasi
MSF works in the inner-city slums of Johannesburg, the destination point for many survival migrants seeking opportunity, transit, or simply to hide among Joburg’s millions of inhabitants. But finding safe shelter here is extremely challenging.
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(Source: doctorswithoutborders.org)
In South Africa and the whole of Africa, if we do see a decrease in funding, it will mean we go back on all of the progress made so far after six years of heavy support. We currently have about 1 million people on ARV therapy and there are plans to expand that to 2 million by 2016. You will go back to the days when people were dying because they didn’t have access to ARVs. People will have to wait much longer to get access to ARVs, and when they do come to get treatment, they will be much sicker patients.
Gilles van Cutsem, MSF medical coordinator in South Africa and Lesotho
A Vulnerable Existence: Migrants in South Africa
I’m afraid of the xenophobia everybody says is coming after the World Cup.
31-year-old Zimbabwean man living in Johannesburg
A group of people burst into the house, breaking the door. They asked me to show them my South African ID, and when I said I didn’t have any, they started to beat me with sticks, stones, punches, kicks. I managed to escape from the house and started to run along the road, but they didn’t stop. They started to follow me with the car and let me run for a while. They caught me again and beat me up until I was lying on the ground covered in blood. They left me there because they thought I was dead. After a while I tried to move and with difficulty reached a phone box and called an ambulance. The ambulance didn’t arrive. Three people stopped their car when they saw me lying on the ground, carried me into their car and brought me to the hospital. This is not the first time. Last year, six people beat me up, but it wasn’t like now – this time they wanted to kill me.
20-year-old Zimbabwean man in Westernburg, Polokwane
A security force known as the Red Ants violently removed the inhabitants and threw people’s belongings out doors and windows.
© Sara Hjalmarson
In February, more than 1,000 people were evicted from one building in Johannesburg, kicked out onto the street with nowhere to go.
© Ntando Ncube
People living in these derelict buildings often lack basic supplies such as water, sanitation, or electricity, as well as safety. Thousands have been evicted four times in the last nine months.
© Finbarr O'Reilly/REUTERS
Thousands live in squalid conditions in abandoned downtown buildings.
© Finbarr O'Reilly/REUTERS
The quantity of rubbish is growing every day. Look at this big pile. You can see and hear rats moving around all the time. Can you imagine that here children are walking and playing and that in this room – just next to the rubbish – there lives a small baby just few days old?
Mozambican man living in abandoned building in Johannesburg, South Africa
People face crowded conditions in the church.
© Finbarr O'Reilly/REUTERS
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