Politics

The families of hundreds of Libyan children with HIV would receive more than 400 million (R2.8 billion) under a deal expected to help free six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting them, a source said yesterday.

Laws criminalising behaviour that may transmit HIV are the product, not of rational public health choices, but of irrational fears, which provide an inveterately poor basis for rational law-making, according to South Africas Justice Edwin Cameron. Speaking last night at Birkbeck College in central London, at an event co-hosted by NAM and the National AIDS Trust, Mr Justice Cameron argued that the laws current place in the AIDS epidemic is primarily to create legislation specially protecting the rights of those with HIV.

Hundreds of women from all over South Africa braved the early morning cold on Thursday to join Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on a Health Walk in Pretoria. The health walk, held at the University of Pretoria's Groenkloof campus, formed part of the programme for the South African Women in Dialogue Forum (SAWID) Conference which is currently underway.

At least a thousand Tunisian doctors are expected to hit South African shores within the next few months as government continues its robust health professional recruitment drive. The Tunisian doctors are to be deployed in under-served areas of the country where there are major shortages of health professionals.

A national antenatal survey for 2006 has shown a decrease in the prevalence of HIV among pregnant women visiting public health facilities, national health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Monday.

Closing date: 31 July 2007
Health Systems Unit and Centre for malaria & tropical diseases, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal has a vacancy for a Senior Researcher.

Government continued to deliver services Wednesday, despite the national public sector wage strike, which included solidarity marches involving private sector unions.

South Africa launched a revamped national AIDS plan on Wednesday as new research showed the high cost of government inaction on the epidemic -- 1 500 South Africans are infected with HIV every day.

CAPE TOWN Medical Research Council (MRC) president Anthony MBewu yesterday sought to reassure Parliament that the organisations work on the international Ushershell microbicide trial, which was stopped early after 35 women developed HIV, had been conducted to the highest scientific and ethical standards.

In the context of extensive local and international comment on the contentious issue of detention of patients with XDR-TB in South Africa, the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) wishes to state that: