South Africa's new five-year HIV/AIDS plan represents 'unprecedented cooperation' between government, civil society

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Mar 22 2007

South Africa's new five-year HIV/AIDS plan is an "unprecedented cooperation" between the government and civil society organizations in the country, Glenda Gray, executive director of the Perinatal Health Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and David Harrison, CEO of loveLife, write in a Sunday Independent opinion piece.

If South Africa is to "avoid becoming mired in an intractable epidemic," the country needs to "chart clear paths from the outset," the authors write, adding that there are 10 "priorities for the first 100 days of" the HIV/AIDS plan's implementation that "either hold quick potential gain or open up new frontiers in the national response." According to Gray and Harrison, the 10 priorities are:

Establishing a national treatment literacy program;
Initiating an "extensive" HIV testing campaign involving "prominent national and community figures";
Increasing behavior-change interventions to ensure that more than 70% of the country's population is reached by such interventions;
Targeting the "spike" in HIV cases among women ages 18 to 21;
Targeting schools that report five or more pregnancies annually;
Renewing national efforts to keep young people enrolled in school;
Reinforcing the beneficial effects of businesses in the fight against HIV;
Establishing a national "positive prevention" initiative to ensure that HIV-positive people are aware of treatment, prevention and care options;
Focusing on "key biomedical interventions that can make a big impact"; and
Setting "clear benchmarks of progress" during the plan's first 100 days.

The "very first step" in South Africa's HIV/AIDS plan is to "share a common roadmap of the most critical pathways and markers of progress towards an HIV-free generation," Gray and Harrison conclude (Gray/Harrison, Sunday Independent, 3/18).

This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.