AIDS tops Minister’s agenda
‘Health is difficult, it’s complex, it’s a whole range of things, it’s under enormous stresses from HIV and AIDS. But we should be able to effect a turn-around within a period of five years’, said Hogan.
Hogan displays an unmistakable passion for issues related HIV and AIDS. She speaks candidly about what needs to be done to successfully implement the National Strategic Plan for HIV and AIDS.
‘I think the greatest success is having 550 000 people on treatment now. That alone helps us to take the burden off hospitals and institutions. That, I think is critical. We’ve got to accelerate it’¦ and also Voluntary Counselling and Testing and getting people to come out more, to be comfortable with taking the treatment ‘ the acceleration of that, but also the acceleration of the prevention of mother-to-child transmission. That should not be as complex as the antiretroviral rollout. Getting children free of any AIDS will help us so much in the future. Treatment is very, very important and needs to be expedited but prevention is equally as important. When we’re seeing that the incidences are very high in the age of 25 ‘ 40, we’re talking about our economically active population. There, I think our prevention campaigns need more focus, more direction’¦ It’s encouraging that we seem to be seeing some kind of levelling off’¦ but prevention is extremely important as well. We would be focusing on the quality of our prevention programmes, the efficacy of that’.
Hogan said all this possible under the new political leadership of the country, which has pledged a will to make health a major priority going forward.
‘Fortunately for me, I come in post-Polokwane where the Polokwane conference of the ruling party took as a decision that education and health must be the two priorities. And I’m seeing that already – that emphasis. Behind the scenes the ANC has been working very, very hard with a number of very skilled and very experienced people on a programme around HIV and AIDS and health generally and diagnosing where the problems are. And I’m fairly certain that health and education are going to receive the priority that they do require. I do not anticipate that we will have the kind of resistance that might have occurred in earlier times to the issues of health. I think there’s a common recognition in Cabinet that this is something that has to be driven. That’s what I was told by the President and the SG of the ANC, that is, ‘you’ve been appointed, you’ve got to sort out these issues’.’
Author
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
AIDS tops Minister’s agenda
by Health-e News, Health-e News
October 16, 2008