Amid a growing list of government shortcomings, there is a good story to tell on Tuesday, World Aids Day, about the progress the Zuma administration has made against the pandemic.
Last week, the UN Joint Programme on Aids praised our country for significant strides against the virus.
Thanks to the biggest antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programme in the world – more than 3 000 000 people are on it – our life expectancy has increased by a remarkable 10 years in a decade.
The average South African will die as a pensioner, not a 51-year-old. But it would be literally fatal to rest now that advances are being made.
South Africa has 6.4 million HIV-positive people. This means that more than 3m are not yet under treatment. Our efforts to prevent new infections are not nearly good enough.
A quarter of the world’s new HIV infections take place in South Africa, young women the worst affected.
There is the immense challenge of behavioural change. Condom use is also waning. Then there is the problem that researchers euphemistically call “loss to follow-up”, referring to patients on ARVs who disappear. There are a lot of them.
Some studies say that about a fifth of South Africans who start ARVs disappear. Some simply move, go to other clinics where they resume treatment; others think they are well enough to stop it. Insufficient is being done to keep people on their ARVs.
Clinic staff are too busy; many NGOs that used to support people living with HIV do not have funds to do so any longer. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), for instance, is going to retrench people and close some offices this Christmas. It has already cut back on infrastructure.
It took on a government in denial, and has for more than 15 years been the voice of the African continent on the pandemic. The battle is far from won, it must not be allowed to close its doors.