Even if Zuma’s World AIDS Day speech is matched with sufficient budget allocation, innovative models of providing HIV and TB care will be needed to achieve the targets of the National Strategic Plan. Lesley Odendal reflects on the lessons learnt in Khayelitsha’s HIV and TB project as a window into the future.home hiv test, hiv self test, home hiv kit
On World AIDS day of last year Zuma stated, “We have no choice but to deploy every effort, mobilise every resource, and utilise every skill that our nation possesses, to ensure that we prevail in this struggle for the health and prosperity of our nation The amount of resources dedicated to prevention, treatment and care [for HIV and TB] has increased…but it is not enough. Much more needs to be done. We need extraordinary measures to reverse the trends we are seeing in the health profile of our people.”home hiv test, hiv self test, home hiv kit
Despite the poverty of the area, the Khayelitsha programme is a place where extraordinary measures have been implemented for more than a decade. It is an important model for demonstrating the feasibility of different strategies to achieve the targets set forth in the National Strategic Plan (NSP) for HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), including achieving “universal coverage” of antiretrovirals, by 2011- all of which would have been impossible without the relentless combined efforts of Khayelitsha residents, the Treatment Action Campaign, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Provincial Government of the Western Cape, the City of Cape Town, the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and many others.home hiv test, hiv self test, home hiv kit
Khayelitsha was the first in South Africa to provide ARVs in public sector clinics and its initial success contributed to the paradigm shift from the consensus that providing ARVs was not feasible in poor settings, to making it a priority. It is also one of two pilot projects in the country to provide treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) in clinics while patients live at home, rather than requiring hospitalisation away from family and friends for at least six months.home hiv test, hiv self test, home hiv kit
Doctors working in Khayelitsha hailed the first of December 2009 as the first “happy” World AIDS Day this country had ever seen. Indeed President Zuma’s speech and the newly approved HIV treatment guidelines include evidence-based HIV and TB policy shifts that many had been fighting for for years, such as providing ARVs to all HIV-infected infants and to pregnant women and people with TB with a CD4 count of less than 350. The President also committed to treating TB and HIV “under one roof” and ensuring that all the health institutions in the country are ready to assist patients and not just a few accredited ARV centres.home hiv test, hiv self test, home hiv kit