Treatment Action Campaign

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) welcomes the appointments of Ms Barbara Hogan as the Minister of Health and Dr Molefi Sefularo as the Deputy Minister of Health. We congratulate President Motlanthe for making these excellent appointments.

We are confident that Hogan has the ability to improve the South African health system. She has been one of the few Members of Parliament to speak out against AIDS denialism and to offer support to the TAC, even during the worst period of AIDS denialism by former President Thabo Mbeki and former Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. 0n 14 February 2003, she received the TAC memorandum to President Mbeki for a treatment plan. She was removed as Finance Portfolio Chairperson by Mbeki in part for her stand on HIV/AIDS. She has a reputation for being hard-working, competent and principled.

Hogan has a long record of struggle for human rights. Twenty-seven years ago, she was detained and tortured by the apartheid security Police. She was tried for treason as an ANC member and spent eight years in prison.

The combination of antiretroviral (ARV) and tuberculosis (TB) treatments could more than halve the mortality rate among patients coinfected with HIV and TB, according to a randomised open-label trial by the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA).

The Starting Antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Three Points in Tuberculosis therapy (SAPIT) trial compared three treatment strategies of ARV initiation in HIV/TB co-infected patients. The trial examined differences in treatment outcomes depending on when patients initiated ARV treatment in conjunction with TB treatment.

The first group started ARVs within the first two months of starting TB treatment; the second group started ARVs after the two-month intensive phase of TB treatment (the integrated treatment arms) and the third group started ARVs only after completing their TB treatment (the sequential treatment arm). A standardised once a day ARV regimen of ddI, 3TC and efavirenz was given to the 645 patients participating in the trial, all of whom had smear-positive pulmonary TB and HIV infection with CD4 counts of less than 500.

This section details TAC's attempts to overcome the information vaccuum that existed in the camps and community sites.  This is our effort to relay information to displaced people about the political, legal and other developments relating to the xenophobic crisis.  The newsletters were each designed with content input from civil society stakeholders as well as refugee leadership  about what information is needed and wanted within their sites.

Newsletter #10 (17 October 2008)

Newsletter #9 (3 October 2008)

By Nathan Geffen, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Policy Co-ordinator

1 June 2008

Part One: Shattered Myths

Here you can make a secure credit card donation to TAC in South African Rands.