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Corruption and poor oversight have undermined South Africa's fight against HIV/ Aids, a new report says . The authors, the Institute of Security Studies and Transparency International, say there has been a "potentially lethal cocktail of mismanagement". They blame South Africa's president for questioning the link between HIV and Aids and say his stance has had an impact on the whole health system. South Africa has the highest incidence of Aids in the world. The report, titled A Lethal Cocktail, says 30% of the population is infected. 'Lives endangered' Politicisation of the disease has created numerous channels for abuse and is undermining attempts to counter it, the report says. The authors conclude that it has become difficult to disentangle corruption from mismanagement and system failure as the root causes of the poor response to Aids. Much of the responsibility is laid at the door of President Thabo Mbeki, whose well-known questioning of the link between ...

Aids: A South African success story By Martin Plaut year ago, when I visited a squatter camp called Freedom Park, north-west of Johannesburg, I met a young orphan called Bongani.It's a rough, tough area, that is home to 20,000 people - and Aids has decimated this community. Half the women who come for antenatal tests are HIV positive. Bongani lived in a small yellow painted hut, with his grandmother. He had lost his mother, his father and his aunt in the past year. He was very sick with diarrhoea and had not been to school in two weeks. He was very small for his age but somehow they were struggling through. The plight of Bongani was not unusual - indeed I was told that he was lucky because he had a grandmother. Many children who lose their parents to HIV and Aids have no-one. Change Now on my return to Freedom Park, the transformation is remarkable. He looks and feels well and has grown a lot in the past year. Last Updated: Wednesday, 1 December 2004, 11:27 GMT E-mail this to a ...

The joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) has dramatically reduced its estimate of the number of people living with HIV around the world. According to the new statistics, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV globally, down from the 39.5 million estimate made at the end of 2006. Much of the reduction can be attributed to better surveillance techniques now being used in many countries, most notably India. Earlier this year, India reduced its HIV estimate by around 3 million people after numbers from a large household survey showed HIV prevalence was much lower than previous antenatal clinic and surveillance site data had suggested. This trend has been echoed in several other countries, and has led UNAIDS to adjust antenatal survey estimates downwards by an average factor of 0.8 for the 2007 report. Antenatal surveys are considered less accurate than more general population sampling, as many of the women that access antenatal clinics will be (by default) more sexual...

UK patients are now eligible to receive a new type of HIV drug - the first new oral class of HIV/Aids treatment in more than a decade. Pfizer's Celsentri (maraviroc) blocks HIV's entry to immune system cells. Although it is not a cure, it can help patients who have not responded to other available HIV drugs. HIV charities welcomed the drug's arrival, which has taken Pfizer 10 years to develop at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Novel action A cocktail of three drugs collectively called HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) has dramatically improved the life expectancy of patients with HIV, but resistance to these drugs is a problem. Maraviroc was approved in the US in August, where it is marketed under the name of Selzentry. It is taken in combination with other anti-retroviral drugs, but works in an entirely new way. It blocks a microscopic doorway - the CCR5 receptor - which HIV uses to enter and infect human cells called CD4-T-cells. All other currently...

A new type of HIV drug, designed for people who are resistant to other treatments, has been approved by the US authorities. Roche, the makers of Fuzeon are confident it will also win European approval within weeks. Fuzeon is the first of a new class of drugs known as fusion inhibitors. It is designed to combat the growing problem of resistance to older HIV drugs. However, the drug is likely to be very expensive - around $20,000 a year. This drug will extend treatment options for people who are in dire need Michael Carter And it is predicted that as few as 12,000 people world-wide will get the drug by the end of this year. Fuzeon, also known as T-20, has been eagerly awaited because it is the first real alternative treatment in seven years for Aids patients running out of options. Unlike existing drugs that work inside the cell, Fuzeon blocks HIV from entering healthy human immune cells. Impressive results Research published on the New England Journal of Medicine website found that HIV ...

A new type of HIV drug, designed for people who are resistant to other treatments, has been approved by the US authorities. Roche, the makers of Fuzeon are confident it will also win European approval within weeks. Fuzeon is the first of a new class of drugs known as fusion inhibitors. It is designed to combat the growing problem of resistance to older HIV drugs. However, the drug is likely to be very expensive - around $20,000 a year. This drug will extend treatment options for people who are in dire need Michael Carter And it is predicted that as few as 12,000 people world-wide will get the drug by the end of this year. Fuzeon, also known as T-20, has been eagerly awaited because it is the first real alternative treatment in seven years for Aids patients running out of options. Unlike existing drugs that work inside the cell, Fuzeon blocks HIV from entering healthy human immune cells. Impressive results Research published on the New England Journal of Medicine website found that HIV ...

A vitamin made when sunlight hits the skin could help slow down the ageing of cells and tissues, say researchers. A King's College London study of more than 2,000 women found those with higher vitamin D levels showed fewer ageing-related changes in their DNA. However, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study stops short of proving cause and effect. A lack of vitamin D has already been linked to multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. It's possible that the same sunshine which may increase our risk of skin cancer may also have a healthy effect on the ageing process in general Professor Tim Spector King's College London The genetic material inside every cell has an inbuilt "clock", which counts down every time the cell reproduces itself. The shortening of these strands of DNA called telomeres is one way of examining the ageing process at a cellular level. Snapshot measurement The King's team looked at white blood cells, which tend to experience fas...