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'More needed to win Aids war'
24/05/2007 16:40 - (SA)
Johannesburg - A critical shortage of health care workers and restrictions on prescribing life-saving drugs are crippling the war on HIV/Aids in southern Africa, medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Thursday.
In a gloomy report on frontline Aids treatment in South Africa and three neighbouring countries, the French humanitarian group concluded that the pandemic could not be stemmed without a surge in the number of doctors, nurses and medical assistants.
"More pills and more infrastructure will not improve the problem. We have another bottleneck, and that is health care staffing," Dr Eric Goemaere, head of MSF in South Africa, said in a press conference in Johannesburg.
He added that it was "hypocrisy" for governments and international donors to commit themselves to the goal of providing universal access to anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) while failing to fund enough staff to prescribe the medications.
About 1 million people with HIV in South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi and Lesotho - four of the countries hardest hit by HIV/Aids - need but do not have access to the ARV treatment, the report said.
It noted that there were only 89 doctors in all of Lesotho, where more than 40 000 are waiting for these drugs.
Reverse policies
In South Africa, where 11% of the country's 45 million population is infected with HIV, about 700 000 needy HIV patients are going without the treatment.
The crisis is especially bad in rural areas where clinics are saturated with a backlog of cases, the report said.
MSF urged governments to fund more health care workers and improve their wages and working conditions and asked donors, like the International Monetary Fund, to reverse policies that ban funding for health care salaries and other recurring costs.
It also said it supported programmes that give qualified nurses and medical assistants the right to prescribe drugs to patients with HIV/Aids as well as tuberculosis, which often accompanies and helps spread HIV.
'Resistance from doctors'
Nurses and medical assistants are the primary health care providers in much of Africa, especially outside of cities, and allowing them to prescribe drugs to patients could boost the fight against the disease.
But the idea has met resistance from doctors who fear that doing so could water down the quality of healthcare.
Others are concerned that already overworked nurses will be unable to carry the extra load.
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