"There has been a dramatic turnaround in mortality. Now it's so refreshing to write a positive story. "Three years ago there were really doom and gloom stories about how bad things were and how we were going in the wrong direction. The mood is very different from when Karim and colleagues began their research, he said. "The rapid transition from the failed stewardship of ex-president Thabo Mbeki and the disastrous policies of his health minister, Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, to the leadership shown by the present health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, and his team could not have been more striking The advances were hailed by the medical journal the Lancet, in a paper co-authored by Karim. South Africa has increased its domestic expenditure on Aids to $1.6bn, the highest by any low- and middle-income country. The rate at which HIV-positive mothers transmitted the virus to their babies decreased from 8.5% in 2008 to 2.7% in 2011.Ī national HIV counselling and testing campaign that was launched two years ago has notched 20m HIV tests in 20 months. Now the total stands at 1.9m, the biggest programme on the planet.Īids-related deaths decreased from 257,000 in 2005 to 194,000 in 2010, according to the Actuarial Society of South Africa. In 2005, under Mbeki and health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang – who promoted a "treatment" of beets and garlic – only 133,000 patients were on ARVs. In this case, the catalyst was the industrial scale distribution of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs by the public health sector, greatly reducing deaths among people in their 30s. Professor Salim Abdool Karim, president of the South African Medical Research Council, said the rise in life expectancy – from 54 years in 2005 to 60 in 2011 – was of the order usually only seen after a major societal shift, such as the abolition of slavery. It is also a rare shaft of light for President Jacob Zuma and his government, recently besieged by violent industrial unrest, scandals over corruption and frustration over failing schools and a dearth of jobs.
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