HIV/AIDS Public Health Policies: A Comparison Between South Africa and Cuba

HIV/AIDS is still a current public health concern for all countries of the world. Research has helped progress the education and treatment of the virus, but some areas of the world still have difficulty with this public health concern. Out of all developing countries, South Africa has one of the highest percentages of their population living with HIV/AIDS while Cuba has one of the lowest percentages of their population living with the virus. In this paper, the public health policies of South Africa and Cuba regarding treatment, prevention and transmission will be discussed and compared.

South Africa is one of the countries that are part of Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS infected people in the world. This region contains 10% of the population of the world and has 60% of HIV/AIDS infected people living in this area (Jacobsen, 2008). By 2007, the amount of people that had died in South Africa that were infected by the virus reached over two million (Gilbert, 2008). Due to the amount of people infected with the virus, the government and medical community of South Africa needed to implement a plan to deal with the epidemic. The National AIDS Coordinating Committee of South Africa (NACOSA) was formed in 1992 to develop a national plan to deal with the issue (South African Government Information, 2007). The National Strategic Plan (NSP) was developed by the NACOSA review in 1999 which focused on the government improving “education, health services, reduction of poverty, the empowerment of women, and the provision of basic services such as shelter, clean water, and sanitation” (South African Government Information, 2007, p. 18). In 2007, the South African government developed a National S...

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Gilbert, L. (2008). Public health and health professionals in the times of HIV/AIDS. South African Review Of Sociology, 39(2), 301-316.

Gorry, C. (2008, July). Cuba’s HIV/AIDS strategy: An integrated, rights-based approach, MEDICC Review: International Journal of Cuban Health and Medicine. Retrieved from http://www.medicc.org/ns/assets/documents/Cuban%20HIV%20Strategy.pdf

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South African Government Information. (2007, March 12). HIV & AIDS and STI strategic plan for South Africa 2007 – 2011. Retrieved from http://www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2007/aidsplan2007/index.html