This is an archive of the Treatment Action Campaign's public documents from December 1998 until October 2008. I created this website because the TAC's website appears unmaintained and people were concerned that it
was becoming increasingly hard to find important documents.

The menu items have been slightly edited and a new stylesheet applied to the site. But none of the documents have been edited, not even for minor errors. The text appears on this site as obtained from the Internet Archive.

The period covered by the archive encompassed the campaign for HIV medicines, the civil disobedience campaigns, the Competition Commission complaints, the 2008 xenophobic violence and the PMTCT, Khayelitsha health workers and Matthias Rath court cases.

TAC Electronic Newsletter

25 June 2007

Contents

TAC and the Coalition Against Public Health Cuts to hold mass community meeting in Khayelitsha

Health services in the Western Cape and specifically in Khayelitsha continue to fail to meet the enormous health needs of its people. The terrible queues, unacceptably long waiting times for hospital beds and delayed operations have been highlighted in recent months. They depict an ongoing life and death crisis in health care. 

For some years, the Department of Health in the Western Cape has promised the people of Khayelitsha a new hospital. This promise was welcomed as the need for additional centres to relieve the tremendous pressure on existing hospitals is urgent.  However, we have still not seen any evidence that this hospital will be built now or in the near future. 

Instead, the Department has cut the budgets of Groote Schuur and Tygerberg hospitals (total R56 million). These hospitals belong to the people of Cape Town and are used primarily by the poor of this city.  People from Khayelitsha depend on these services and form a high percentage of the patients in these two hospitals.

We are inviting the Department of Health to our meeting to:

Here are the details of the meeting:

Date: Wednesday 27 April 2007
Time: 15:00
Venue: Site B Community Hall, Khayelitsha
 
Contacts:
Vuyiseka Dubula 082 763 3005
Lydia Cairncross 082 786 7014

[END OF KHAYELITSHA MEETING]

Accessing life-saving medical technologies for HIV: What needs to be done?

Here is the final version of a paper originally presented to the South African Human Rights Commission South African Human Rights Commission on 30 May 2007. It was also made available at the South African AIDS Conference in Durban in June 2007. We hope that activists, people with HIV and clinicians will urge government to carry out the paper's recommendations.

Abstract of the paper

The state has a constitutional duty both to increase access to safe, effective, quality medical technologies that prolong or improve life and to protect the public from unproven or dangerous ones. The state is failing to do this adequately for the HIV epidemic. This article explains the structure of the institutions responsible for these tasks and describes some of the critical medical technologies for managing the HIV epidemic that are not being made sufficiently accessible. It also identifies unproven and probably illegal medical interventions that are being marketed with impunity because either the state is not taking action to stop this marketing or it is actively colluding with such activities. The institutional framework for achieving the correct balance for medicine access appears to exist, though there is a shortage of staff in some of these departments. A key cause of the problem appears to be lack of political will. A commission of inquiry is needed to determine what must be done to rectify the situation.


Authors: Nathan Geffen, Polly Clayden, Jonathan Berger, Gregg Gonsalves and Mara Kardas-Nelson

[END OF RELEASE OF PAPER]

Joint Civil Society Monitoring Forum (JCSMF) News

Launch of JCSMF website

The JCSMF has established a website. It contains lots of useful information, including:

Go to www.jcsmf.org.za

The site is being continuously updated. We welcome feedback. Email .

Statement from the 10th Joint Civil Society Monitoring Forum Meeting

Durban, Tuesday 5 June 2007

The meeting welcomed the participation of the Deputy Minister of Health, the most high-ranking official yet to address the Forum. The meeting further welcomed the frank and constructive discussions with the Deputy Minister and the Deputy Chairperson of SANAC, Mr Mark Heywood.

JCSMF supports the National Strategic Plan (NSP) and makes the following recommendations in relation to its implementation:

Key immediate priorities noted during the meeting were:

[END OF JCSMF STATEMENTS]