Southern Africa's health ministers meet to discuss regional challenges

Health ministers from 14 southern African countries Thursday began their two-day meeting in the Malawi capital Lilongwe that would focus on efforts to deal with the region's worsening health condition.

The health ministers from the regional bloc, Southern African Development Community (SADC), converged to discuss how the region would deal with issues of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis (TB), shortage of health personnel, avian and human influenza and sexual reproductive health.

Opening the meeting, Lesotho's Health and Social Welfare Minister Mphu Ramatlapeng admitted that the challenges posed by the burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases in southern Africa was huge and required joint efforts by all SADC member states.

Ramatlapeng, who is also chairperson for SADC health ministers, said southern Africa's success in dealing with the health challenges were suffering a huge setback in the wake of multi-drug and extreme drug resistant types of tuberculosis that had hit the region recently.

"The coexistence of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS and resistance of malaria parasites to drugs and mosquitoes to insecticides is a further contributory factor to this setback," she said.

The prevalence of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in southern Africa has continued to increase at alarming rate in the past few years and the condition has been worsened with the dual HIV/AIDS and TB infection.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the region is grappling with a 50 percent TB infection rate of all TB cases in Africa although the region has only 25 percent of the continent's population.

The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has also tagged southern Africa as the worst HIV/AIDS hit sub-region in the world where 10 most affected countries are located.

source:www.english.people.com.cn