HIV/AIDS Public Health Policies: A Comparison Between South Africa and Cuba

Education of HIV/AIDS is very important to help prevent from becoming infected with this deadly disease. There are many factors that are being looked at that may be associated with the affect of the transmission of HIV such as, gender relationships, social exclusion and poverty, etc. These issues happen every day and health care providers must help those infected with HIV/AIDS to start treatment right away (Mayo Group, 2010). A national health policy must formulate different guidelines what will enable the policy to help the government govern the public. This stage is really important to help bring health care policies together.

There are an immense amount of problems in Africa caused by the AIDS disease. Healthcare providers are available and located all over Africa. Even though they are available, they have only “enough medicine for long-term survival available for 30,000 Africans” (Copson, 3).

The world as a whole should be mortified by what is happening in Sub-Saharan Africa. In places like Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho poverty, crime and systematic corruption are the tinder for the fire that is the HIV epidemic in Africa.

In The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein talks about why HIV/AIDS rate is so high in Africa compared to the rest of the world. Through the book, she gives us an account of the disease and the struggles that many health experts and ordinary Africans went through to understand this disease, and how different African countries approached the same problem differently. Through this paper, I will first address the different ways Uganda and Southern African countries, South Africa and Botswana in particular, dealt with this epidemic, and then explain how we can use what we have learned from these African countries to control outbreaks of communicable disease elsewhere around the world.

Despite the government’s best efforts to downplay the HIV epidemic that was beginning in South Africa, the disease began to spread throughout the general population in the late 1980s. In 1988, cases of seroconversion started to appear in individuals outside of the MSM community; each year, between 1988 and 1994, saw a doubling of HIV prevalence. As of 1990, the dominant mode of transmission for HIV switched from homosexual to heterosexual intercourse, creating an epidemic among the citizens of South Africa. At the same time, the rate of mother-to-child transmission was on the rise. Throughout the escalation of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, the apartheid government took a hard line stance on HIV and AIDS, calling it a ‘black disease’ and refusing to invest resources to combat the spate. Rather, it continued to use fear tactics and stereotyping to reinforce the ‘typical’ HIV-infected individual, targeting MSM and black populations in country-wide campaigns. Any attempts at preventing the spread of disease were usually thwarted by a lack of infrastructure in the local governments and provinces, with each area attempting a different strategy to combat HIV infection.

Although ninety-five percent of people living with HIV/AIDS are in developing countries, the impact of this epidemic is global. In South Africa, where one in four adults are living with the disease, HIV/AIDS means almost certain death for those infected. In developed countries however, the introduction of antiretroviral drugs has meant HIV/AIDS is treated as a chronic condition rather than a killer disease. In developing countries like South Africa, the drugs that allow people to live with the disease elsewhere in the world, are simply too expensive for individuals and governments to afford at market price.

HIV is a virus that affects human immune systems making them susceptible to a variety of diseases that may prove fatal to the patient. Apparently the most affected by this disease are people who live in the developing countries and the African continent. The Sub-Saharan Africa faces the highest HIV prevalence rate. In this region, South Africa faces greater problems associated with HIV and the effects are vast and devastating. As such, the government, organizations and regional organizations come together to fight the menace. This paper seeks to propose that South Africa is actively engaged in HIV control by exploring the various ways in which it undertakes to control and prevent the long suffering of the infected persons as well as

​Today, in the world, especially African Countries in the South are facing an epidemic that has gone completely ignored by their very own government. Instead of proposing policies directed towards reducing the amount of HIV/AIDS cases that continue to rise each year, they have chosen to implement failed policies or none at all. Countries that have attempted to enact government policy to try to decrease the spread of the epidemic has ultimately failed in a broad sense. The epidemic is known as the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the virus Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV) (…). For this research paper, the countries of Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe will be each contrasted to Rwanda. the Southern African Countries’ mentioned previously HIV/AIDS rates are among the highest in Africa because of the lack of government action; whereas Rwanda’s rate of infection is among the lowest. Questions that should be answered by the end of this research paper will be, “Which Southern African Countries’ policies are more effective and why are some more effective than others? Is this perhaps a measure of state capacity?”

Since it’s discovery, HIV has spread relentlessly, bringing about the most devastating pandemic in recorded human history. This pandemic is obliterating the lives and livelihoods of millions of individuals worldwide, with more than 39 million people having died due to AIDS-related causes, 35 million people living with HIV and 2.1 million individuals being newly infected each year. Thus, each day an estimated 15,000 individuals are newly infected and this alarming rate is set to increase. In Swaziland, where gender inequality is pervasive, public services are weak and poverty is extensive, the situation is far worse.

Disease is one of the primary concerns in South Africa today. The distribution of disease can be divided into three categories. Communicable disease accounts for 60.5%, non-intentional injuries 11.2% and non-communicable for 28.4% of the distribution of disease (WHO, 2010, South Africa: health statistics profile 2010). The leading causes of disease in South Africa are human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), tuberculosis, violence, and road accidents (WHO, 2010, health statistics profile 2010).HIV/AIDS has the highest cause of disease by accounting for 40.7% of the diseased population. Tuberculosis follows afterwards with 5.4%, violence at 4.8%, and road traffic accident at 2.6% (WHO, 2010, health

As an upper-middle income country with high spending on healthcare, South Africa has been performing poorly on certain health indicators (as seen in Table 1), with their biggest issue being in the fight against HIV/AIDS (Country and Lending Groups, n.d.). They have one of the highest prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS in the world at 19.1%, and the incidence of new cases is increasing steadily (Milan, 2014; CIA, n.d.). To combat this growing problem President Jacob Zuma launched the largest HIV Counseling and Testing campaign in the world in April 2010 (“Global AIDS”, 2012). In the same year, the country also achieved a significant reduction in the price of antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) (“Global AIDS”, 2012). Despite this progress, these

The Nation Strategic Plan (NSP) is designed to guide South Africa’s response to HIV and AIDS control and develop strategies and interventions to help prevent and treat the disease.

In a recent article that was done by (James Thurlow, 2009) shows that South Africa has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rate with KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) being the worst affected area with the results estimate that almost 26.4% of the working class in the area of (KZN) are affected with HIV which is in comparison with the 15.9% in the rest of the country.

It is to this purpose that the National AIDS Council (NAC) was created in order (1) to Coordinate and support the development of policies, plans and strategies for HIV/AIDS prevention; (2) monitor and evaluate the AIDS response; (3) provide recommendation to the MoH and the country in general on suitable and evidence-based prevention, treatment and coordination strategies; and (4) facilitate the reduction of the impacts of the epidemic (nac.org.zm, 2016)..

Countries are making historic gains towards ending the AIDS epidemic: 700 000 fewer new HIV infections across the world in 2011 than in 2001. latest data show that a 50% reduction in the rate of new HIV infections (HIV incidence) has been achieved in 25 low- and middle-income countries between 2001 and 2011. more than half of these countries are in subSaharan Africa where the majority of the new HIV infections occur. In a further nine countries the rate of new HIV infections fell steeply—by at least one third between 2001 and 2011. The national declines in HIV incidence in populations shows that sustained investments and increased political leadership for the AIDS response are paying dividends. In particular, countries with a concurrent scale up of HIV prevention and treatment programmes are seeing a drop in new HIV infections to record lows. Prevention leads to behaviour change; treatment reduces a person’s viral load. Both reduce the potential for the virus to be transmitted. The historic slow-down indicates HIV