What is the situation with HIV prevention efforts in South Africa?
We don’t simply have a crisis of treatment; we also have a critical crisis of prevention. Our country had 500,000 new HIV infections last year and it’s critical that we act on that and look at why the ABC [abstinence, be faithful, use a condom] message has failed. You cannot reduce prevention of HIV to a simple slogan. We need a comprehensive prevention program that is linked to serious treatment and care issues. I think all of us know that prevention is the key to ending the epidemic and that means we have to find new tools, like vaccines and microbicides. But there isn’t a magic bullet and there’s not going to be one for a long time so we have to use the array of tools that we have at the moment, whether it is barrier methods like male and female condoms or programs to prevent the mother-to-child transmission of HIV. We have some decent programs on prevention, but currently we’re not doing enough to scale them up. Why haven’t activists been more involved in prevention advocacy? For m
