“The
right to health is fundamental to the physical and mental well-being of all
individuals and is a necessary condition for the exercise of other human rights
including the pursuit of an adequate standard of living.” extract from the introduction of chapter 4, Right to Health Care by the
South African HRC. Section 27 of the Bill of Rights of the South African
constitution further on states that everyone has a right to access health care.
Today, the world commemorates the 2017 World
AIDS Day under the theme, RIGHT TO
HEALTH, I have the right to know my status and prevention is my responsibility. It is disturbing to know
that even today, there are still people who cannot differentiate between HIV and AIDS. HIV is NOT AIDS. HIV is the virus that weakens a person's ability to fight
infections and cancer. People with HIV are said to have AIDS when they develop
certain infections or cancers or when their CD4 count is less than 800. Once
HIV has entered the body, it replicates. A virus cannot make a copy of itself
on its own; it needs to invade a healthy cell in your body to survive. HIV
targets and invades CD4 cells. CD4 cells help the body’s immune system and
protect it against germs and viruses that make us sick. AIDS is the more advanced
stage of HIV infection. When the immune system CD4 cells drop to a very low
level, a person's ability to fight infection is lost. Without HIV treatment,
full-blown AIDS starts to develop. During this last phase of the disease, the
virus severely damages the immune system to a point where the body can no
longer fight a number of viral, fungal, bacterial and parasitic infections that
invade Having HIV does not always
mean that you have AIDS. It can take many years for people with the virus to
develop AIDS.
Even though the number of
HIV infected patients in South Africa has decreased, the country remains as one
of the countries with the most prevalent HIV infected patients, with over
7 million of the population being infected. Reality is that the young
people of today are the first generation that has never known a world without HIV
and AIDS as they remain at the centre of this epidemic and they have the power,
through their leadership, to definitively change the course of the AIDS
epidemic.
