Extracts from Journals / For your Resource Centre - August 2008

Author(s):

Sudan Food Assistance Transition Study

December 2007

FANTA Project, Academy for Educational Development, Washington DC, USA.

Available at www.fantaproject.org

 

This study was designed to:

  • assess the impact of stability resulting from the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on the most food insecure and nutritionally vulnerable areas and groups in Southern Sudan and
  • make recommendations about how USAID Title II and Disaster Assistance resources should be used to address the food insecurity.

Three I's to reduce the burden of TB in people with HIV

By Theo Smart from the e-newsletter ‘’HIV & AIDS Treatment in Practice (HATIP – see below)’ #112

 

This year, approximately 750,000 people with HIV will develop TB, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. About 230,000 of them will die. But TB is both a preventable and treatable illness so it does not have to be a death sentence in people with HIV.

 

The ‘Three I’s

There are three essential activities that all HIV programmes should be doing that could: - protect people with HIV from TB infection; - help prevent active disease from developing and - identify active TB disease early and improve the chances of cure. These are:

 

  1. Intensified case finding (ICF) for active TB: aggressive screening can lead to the early diagnosis of TB — improving the response to treatment and reducing the likelihood of it spreading to others. It also offers an opportunity to protect people with HIV who don’t yet have TB by:
  2. Giving Isoniazid preventive treatment (IPT), an antibiotic that could reduce their risk of developing active TB by 33-62%; and
  3. Practising TB infection control (IC) which involves measures that can reduce the spread of TB to vulnerable people with HIV, health care workers and the community.

 

HATIP is an electronic newsletter on HIV treatment for health care workers and community-based organisations in resource-limited settings. It has almost 29,000 subscribers in over 100 countries of which about 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa. You can read the whole of the newsletter and get further issues by subscribing at http://www.aidsmap.com/cms1260989.aspx.

For further information visit the HATIP section of www.aidsmap.com/hatip.

 

Making water safer for people living with HIV in Southern Sudan

Extracted from pronut-hiv listserve (16 May 2008).

Due to their weakened immune systems, people living with HIV are particularly susceptible to pathogens that can be present in untreated water. Since the end of the war, treatment tablets have become available in the shops, and HIV-positive people who can afford them are now able to protect themselves from the outbreaks of cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases that are common in this region.

Now Population Services International (PSI – see http://www.psi.org/child-survival) include water treatment tablets in the basic ‘care packets’ they distribute to people with HIV every three months. Each care packet contains 90 tablets (each tablet treats 25 litres of water), a jerry can with a tap at the bottom, water containers, condoms, two mosquito nets and educational materials on malaria and how to prevent HIV infection. The decision to include water tablets in PSI's care packets was partly in response to pressure from people living with HIV.

The distribution of care packets to people living with HIV is to be expanded in the near future. Meanwhile, several organisations, including UNICEF and Solidarits, a French NGO, are raising awareness about hygiene and sanitation, drilling boreholes and repairing existing water points across the country.