Keeping the punch in PMTCT
By Kim Johnson
CATEGORIES: The Media and HIV/AIDS | Children and HIV | PMTCT | Politics and Policy | Hot in the media
10 June 2011
While the weather in Johannesburg continues to cool coverage of HIV has heated up spectacularly. It is refreshing to see an HIV oriented headline spitting bold black print from every second lamppost, as you drive through Johannesburg on a bleak Friday morning. The Star and a few other news media publications have covered the overwhelmingly positive research findings which came out of a study on the government’s PMTCT programme.
The Star has published a front page article on the prevention of mother to child (PMTCT) successes that were revealed through a report by the Medical Research Council. The article dwarfs the only other piece appearing on the page and announces that 67 000 babies have been spared from HIV through the government’s PMTCT strategy.Another PMTCT oriented article appears on page 6 of the same newspaper. The article traces the history of PMTCT in South Africa from times when AZT was falsely labeled as toxic to the TAC winning a lawsuit that allowed nevirapine to be provided through the public sector.
Today South African has aligned itself with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) PMTCT guidelines. It is now government policy that all pregnant women testing positive for HIV with a CD4 count of 350 or less qualify for the PMTCT regimen. The CD4 count limit was defined by the WHO, which stipulates that this is the level at which PMTCT treatment must be initiated in order to protect the health of the unborn child.
While both articles are accurate and well-informed there is a small placement issue. The smaller article supports the more current article and paints a broader picture in which to locate it. However with so many articles competing for the reader’s attention the small insert on page 6 could quite easily be missed.
Not relating the articles to one another in a direct manner takes away from the headlining article. The reader is unable to judge the current successes against the chequered history of PMTCT in South Africa. It would have been more appropriate for the articles to appear on the same page, or within a page of one another. Doing this would make the link between the two pieces explicit and the reader would better appreciate the full extent of the improvement in PMTCT rates.
To read the articles in full click here.
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