South Africa makes progress in HIV, AIDS fight

A patient, right, is attended to, at the US sponsored Themba Lethu,
HIV/AIDS Clinic at the Helen Joseph hospital in Johannesburg. Photo / AP

In the early '90s when South Africa's Themba Lethu clinic could only treat HIV/AIDS patients for opportunistic diseases, many would come in on wheelchairs and keep coming to the health centre until they died.

Two decades later the clinic is the biggest anti-retroviral, or ARV, treatment centre in the country and sees between 600 to 800 patients a day from all over southern Africa. Those who are brought in on wheelchairs, sometimes on the brink of death, get the crucial drugs and often become healthy and are walking within weeks.

"The ARVs are called the `Lazarus drug' because people rise up and walk," said Sue Roberts who has been a nurse at the clinic , run by Right to Care in Johannesburg's Helen Joseph Hospital, since it opened its doors in 1992. She said they recently treated a woman who was pushed in a wheelchair for 3 kilometres (1.8 miles) to avoid a taxi fare and who was so sick it was touch and go. Two weeks later, the woman walked to the clinic, Roberts said.

Such stories of hope and progress are readily available on World AIDS Day 2012 in sub-Saharan Africa where deaths from AIDS-related causes have declined by 32 percent from 1.8 million in 2005 to 1.2 million in 2011, according to the latest UNAIDS report.

- AP