AIDS in South Africa AIDS is a relatively new disease that emerged in the 20th century. It has spread to all parts of the world and claims millions of lives each year. It has become a worldwide concern. It has believed to have originated in Africa and had prevailed over the continent ever since . In recent years one of the countries that has been impacted the most is South Africa. South Africa is one of the most developed countries on the continent and yet the county is plagued by AIDS. Nonprofit and governmental organization from all over the world have joined forces to help combat this disease but the rate of infected individuals are still rising. There have been 6.1 million people living with HIV and around 370 000 new cases a
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It is commonly treated with antiretroviral medications which aim to keep the HIV virus from progressing into AIDS and help keep the virus at check. They have to be taken every day and usually a combination of several drugs are taken at time. This form of therapy is called Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) and aims to prevent the virus from rapid mutation. More than 20 antiretroviral drugs have been developed6. The main problem in the treatment that is not readily available for all members of the society and often it is too costly for a regular person to afford it . The patients are put in on a combination of drugs a form of therapy called first line therapy. If the virus becomes resistant over time or the side effects are to severe the patients are switch to combination of protein inhibitors called Nucleoside/Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NRTIs) and ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitor as suggested by World health organization(WHO)8. This is referred to as second line treatment. As stated in the Evaluation of the WHO criteria for antiretroviral treatment failure among adults in South Africa the clinical and the CD4 criteria used by the WHO when to determine when a person should be put in secondary line treatment has shown poor sensitivity and specificity in determining virological failure(Mee et
It is commonly treated with antiretroviral medications which aim to keep the HIV virus from progressing into AIDS and help keep the virus at check. They have to be taken every day and usually a combination of several drugs are taken at time. This form of therapy is called Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) and aims to prevent the virus from rapid mutation. More than 20 antiretroviral drugs have been developed6. The main problem in the treatment that is not readily available for all members of the society and often it is too costly for a regular person to afford it . The patients are put in on a combination of drugs a form of therapy called first line therapy. If the virus becomes resistant over time or the side effects are to severe the patients are switch to combination of protein inhibitors called Nucleoside/Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NRTIs) and ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitor as suggested by World health organization(WHO)8. This is referred to as second line treatment. As stated in the Evaluation of the WHO criteria for antiretroviral treatment failure among adults in South Africa the clinical and the CD4 criteria used by the WHO when to determine when a person should be put in secondary line treatment has shown poor sensitivity and specificity in determining virological failure(Mee et