syndrome

A 2006 study by the Joint Economic AIDS and Poverty Programme revealed that business owners regarded HIV/AIDS as only ninth out of a list of 10 concerns facing their businesses. Many entrepreneurs are too busy focusing on those businesses to devote time or money to educating staff about the disease.

1. Enhancement of Syndromic Management of STIs in the Selected Cross Border/High Transmission Sites: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland

Africa south of the Sahara is the region most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with more than thirty million people living with HIV and AIDS in the region. It is estimated that there are approximately 10 million young people aged 15-24 years and almost 3 million children under 15 years of age living with HIV.

It gives me great pleasure to present the budget of the national Department of Health for your consideration, debate and acceptance.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic means that even real growth in future health budgets will not be adequate to deal with the increase in demand for services and the effects of the syndrome on health resources. The 2001 Intergovernmental Fiscal Review contains a comprehensive assessment of provincial and local government budgets and expenditure patterns, with particular reference to education, health, social development, housing and roads. It noted that patients admitted to public hospitals with HIV/AIDS-related problems had grown substantially and were progressively displacing other patients, as hospital outputs had not increased significantly. Provincial governments were estimated to spend about R4bn on HIV/AIDS, and the report said the effect of the disease is becoming more visible and is likely to be felt severely in the provincial and local spheres. It added that: it is clear that the current social safety net is not adequately designed for dealing specifically with the impact of HIV/AIDS on households and to confront the complex interaction between HIV/AIDS and poverty. There has been close interaction between the department of health and national treasury recently to ensure that programmes to confront the disease are expanded to the required scale in coming years. Apart from HIV/AIDS, the report highlighted the stark inequities in health provision between provinces. Excluding central funding for hospitals, per capita expenditure on health services in Gauteng was nearly twice that of Mpumalanga and 1,6 times higher than that of Northern Province. Hospital beds ranged from 3,49 per 1 000 people in Gauteng to 1,82 per 1 000 in Mpumalanga. Hospital admissions ranged from 155 to 85 per 1 000, and there was unequal access to specialists with Mpumalanga having 0,9 specialists per 100 000 compared with Gauteng's 30,9. And while there had been progress in the quality of primary healthcare services, significant inequity remained and the report urged further investigation into the real budget decline in allocations for primary care over the next three years. (Source: Business Day, 10 October 2001)

President Thabo Mbeki has acknowledged that government's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic is based on the thesis that HIV causes AIDS, but has insisted that a virus cannot be the cause of a syndrome.