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The feisty red-head and dedicated HIV and AIDS activist, Gail Johnson, marked World AIDS Day with the launch of a new HIV/AIDS haven.

Johnson says that, “When purchasing this village, the board of directors were adamant that we create a new lifestyle community where our residents will benefit from complete holistic care and contribute to the sustainability of the project.”

She says mothers require capacity-building in order for them to be reintegrated into society.

Zimbabwe's adult HIV prevalence rate is continuing its downward trend, showing a drop from 14.1 percent in 2008 to 13.7 percent in 2009, according to new estimates released by the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare.

The 2009 Antenatal Clinic (ANC) Surveillance Survey, based on blood specimens collected from 7,363 pregnant women anonymously screened at 19 clinic sites throughout the country, estimated that 1.1 million Zimbabweans in a probable population of around 11 million were living with HIV.

African health workers continue to be overworked, underpaid and often unappreciated, despite the fact that they form the foundation of the continent’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Without these health workers, Africa’s efforts to stem the tide of the epidemic would be futile.

If developing countries want to succeed in improving their health systems, they urgently need to decentralise them and shift tasks from doctors to nurses and community health workers, said experts at the Fifth International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Cape Town.

South Africa is losing an average of 17 percent of its newly qualified doctors to foreign countries every year, a Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary question revealed.

According to the reply, since 2005, only 4 702 of the 5 689 trainee doctors that applied to do internships applied for community service posts. This means that approximately 1 000 doctors did not register to work in South Africa that year.

The 4th Southern African AIDS Conference was held in early April at Durban’s International Convention Centre. This year’s meeting was themed, 'Scaling up for success', and brought together over 4,000 HIV and AIDS researchers, policy-makers and stakeholders from more than 50 countries.