After Missteps In HIV Care, South Africa Finds Its Way
The South African government is simplifying AIDS care, cutting treatment costs and providing antiviral drugs to almost 2 million people every day.
The country just rolled out a new treatment regimen, which involves just one pill a day and costs less than $120 a year per person. By comparison, similar treatment in the U.S. costs thousands of dollars a year for each person.
Even AIDS activists, who continue to badger the South African Health Ministry, concede that the country is attacking the disease in new and innovative ways.
The delivery of antiviral drugs through the public health care system has been so successful and saved so many lives that the overall life expectancy in the country has increased by eight years since the crest of South Africa's AIDS crisis in the mid-2000s.
Nearly 350,000 South Africans died of AIDS in 2005. But in 2012, that number dropped by nearly half to about 190,000 deaths, the government reports.
At Johannesburg General Hospital, Dr. Francois Venter, who leads the infectious disease department, says South Africa is finally making significant progress against the AIDS epidemic.
"Just anecdotally, at my hospital 10 years ago, there were people dying on the floor," he says. "It was horrible. You'd step over bodies that you were looking after."
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