In just ten years the HIV/Aids infection rate in South Africa has jumped from one per cent of the population to one-third. Seventy per cent of HIV patients are also infected with tuberculosis, which is now the biggest cause of natural death in the country. But doctors say better treatment and education could wipe out the completely curable infection altogether. Al Jazeera's Rosie Garthwaite reports from Khayelitsha township.

KwaZulu-Natal is committed to a massive male circumcision drive using all available medical methods including the controversial Tara Klamp, according to Health MEC Sibongiseni Dhlomo. Circumcised men are up to 60 percent less likely to get HIV than uncircumcised men, according to studies.

In one of the biggest advances in HIV prevention in decades, a vaginal gel containing an antiretroviral drug has been proven to protect almost four out of 10 women from HIV. A study of almost 900 HIV negative women from KwaZulu-Natal found that there was a 39% lower HIV incidence rate in the group that used the gel containing tenofovir. This ARV-containing gel (known as a microbicide) could save over 800,000 lives and prevent 1.3 million new HIV infections over the next two decades in South Africa alone, according to statistician Brian Williams.

Global funding for AIDS efforts fell flat during last year’s economic meltdown, ending a six-year streak of annual donation increases, according to new analysis released this week. Overall, financial support for international HIV/AIDS assistance fell more than 1 percent to R64,2 billion (US $7.6 billion) in 2009, from R65 billion (US$7.7 billion) the previous year, according to a report from Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. The report measured donations from the Group of Eight most industrialized nations, European Commission and other donor governments to low- and moderate-income countries, and noted difficulties interpreting real value as reporting cycles and currency fluctuated.

"I'm a woman with a disability. I am HIV-positive and I am on ARVs (antiretroviral drugs). My life is very hard." These were the first words Immaculate, a 52-year-old landmine survivor in northern Uganda, said to me when I met her in May. "It took long for me to declare my status. I felt I should just die," she said. Margaret is another Ugandan with HIV who also has an amputated leg from a landmine accident.

A big effort is under way to circumcise 80% of young men in Zimbabwe after a study four years ago found that the operation reduced the chance of contracting HIV by 60%. Yet the procedure is still not widely available across sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV prevalence is high, the International Aids Conference in Vienna was told.

Urgent action is needed to stop the rapid and alarming loss of genetic diversity of African livestock that provide food and in come to 70 per cent of rural Africans, according to an analysis presented at a gathering of African scientists and development experts here.

Kenya’s Constitutional Court is due to set a date on Jul 22 for a hearing on the application against the Anti-Counterfeit Act of 2008, of which clauses pertaining to medicines have been suspended pending the court’s decision on whether the law violates the right to health and life.

For African countries to achieve the Millennium Develop ment Goals (MDGs), it is important to prevent deaths resulting from diarrhoea, which is the biggest killer of children in Africa, said Yunia Musaazi, East African policy adviser for Water Aid. 'Everyday, 2,000 African children die from diarrhoea. These deaths are preventa ble by providing safe water and maintaining sanitation,' said Musaazi, one of the panelists drawn from civil society organi sations across Africa.

Over 25,000 cases of measles and 121 deaths have been recorded since the outbreak of the highly-contagious disease was reported in Malawi in February. Director of Preventive Health Services, Dr. Storn Kabuluzi, said the disease was still spreading but government was doing all it could to contain it.

Despite the various challenges confronting the agricultural sector in Africa, most countries in the continent have recorded a five per cent agriculture growth rate in the last 10 years, according to the Executive Secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Monty Jones. 'Actually when you look back in the last 50 years, a number of African countries were exporting their agricultural produce; somewhere along the line, we saw a drop in agricultural activities and it was stagnant,' Jones told journalists during a news briefing on the sideline of the fifth African Agriculture Science week.

Tinashe, a single mother of three living in Mbare township in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, regularly misses a meal so as to stretch her US$90 a month income, and occasionally gives her children food left over from her employers' meals at the middle-class household where she is a domestic worker.

Nine-year-old Nomasonto* had no choice but to switch roles with her mother and care for the HIV-positive woman who gave birth to her. Instead of worrying about homework and going out to play with her friends, Nomasonto’s daily concerns were now a matter of life and death. Suddenly the child had to wash her mother, change and feed her. She even had to take her ill mother to hospital for checkups and to collect her medication.

Josephine is just one of the more than 250,000 people who have been forced to flee their homes in this isolated and chaotic corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The reason for her flight – and that of many others – is one of the world's most ruthless armed militias, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) which is infamous for its attacks on civilians. Thirty-five year old Josephine arrived at the Li-nakofu site for internally displaced person (IDPs) following an LRA attack on her village.

A new report from AVAC surveys the state of biomedical HIV prevention research, including the first evidence of vaccine-induced protection in humans and the emergence of ARV-based prevention—and provides strategic recommendations for moving forward in a time of constrained resources and faltering commitment to ending AIDS.

ViiV Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer's joint venture company for AIDS drugs, is opening its entire product line-up to generic drugmakers working in the world's poorest countries. The announcement, on the eve of next week's international AIDS conference in Vienna, means generic companies will be able to obtain royalty-free voluntary licences for all current ViiV products, as well as products still in development.

Recently appointed co-Home Affairs Minister Theresa Makone is reported to have asked officials in her ministry to explain why ZANU PF officials and military officers, implicated in the looting of white-owned farms, have not been investigated or arrested. A report in the weekly Zimbabwe Independent newspaper quotes Makone saying she had received a dossier containing ‘a long list’ of cases where officials have either looted property or taken over farms in defiance of court orders. Makone told the paper she was still working on the document and had given a copy to the permanent secretary in the ministry ‘to check what happened to the cases.”

International AIDS Conferences—like the one planned for next week in Vienna—can be strange affairs. On the one hand, there is a reason to celebrate: Scaled up treatment campaigns have prolonged millions of lives; HIV testing and education are reaching many more. Yet, on the other hand, there is the reality that more than 33 million people are living with HIV worldwide. Despite efforts to expand treatment, nearly three million more become infected each year. In Zambia alone, over one million people are living with HIV.

When Baraka, a young mother in Guidimouni, southern Niger, took her 13-month-old son Abdul to the local health centre, tests showed that he was suffering from severe acute malnutrition and malaria. He spent a week in an outpatient feeding programme but continued to lose weight.

As government implements a new HIV/AIDS treatment regimen according to latest world standards, a major grouping of non-governmental organisations are concerned that the high cost of the new medication will mean government will no longer be able provide free treatment to as many people as before. The Malawi Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (MANET+) advocacy officer George Kampango told IPS that the new drugs, which cost three times as much as the current regime used, will be too expensive for government to manage providing free treatment to the poor and children.