South African Strike Detrimental to AIDS Patients

In South Africa, nurses, teachers, doctors and government workers are in the midst of a strike in an attempt to get better wages. It is hard not to support a strike like that when worldwide, these occupations oftentimes call for hard work and not enough pay; however, these strikes may have some very serious side effects. AIDS activists are nervous because this nationwide strike is causing some AIDS patients to not get adequately treated which is devastating to a country that has the most cases of AIDS infections worldwide.

One doctor, Dr. Ashraf Coovadia stated that at the AIDS clinic he works at in a Johannesburg hospital, the staff was used to seeing close to 80 patients on a daily basis, but that number went down to about 25 a day since the strike began. There could be a variety of reasons why AIDS patients have not been coming in as regularly. Coovadia thinks some patients may mistakenly think the hospital has been completely closed down due to the strike or they may worry they will get caught in the midst of a battle between the strikers and police. Coovadia is not participating in the strike and he and his staff has made it a priority to call those AIDS patients who may be running out of their antiretroviral drugs to plead with them to come in and refill them. In order to make his patients feel safe, he has spoken with strikers and security guards who will get his patients in safely. He states, “The situation is quite volatile.”

It is imperative that an AIDS patient not miss any of their medication because even missing a few days of their drug treatment can cause their body to develop a resistance to the drugs causing problems in their overall treatment. Coovadia adds, “This is affecting hundreds of thousands of patients across the country.”

A spokesperson for the health workers’ union, Sizwe Pamla, states that before the strike began, preparations were made for skeleton crews to handle the AIDS patients along with other critical-care patients. Pamla admits, however, that the relationship with the government has reached such a low point that it has been hard keeping workers from joining the strike. The union is demanding an 8.6% wage increase as well as a $137 housing allowance. The government has stated that it can only afford to do a 7% increase and a $96 housing allowance. Pamla states, “This country has got millions of people with HIV who need care. It’s sad that we are sitting here blaming each other.”

There have been many incidents where AIDS patients have driven miles to visit a clinic only to find the doors closed and the staff gone. This strikes comes on the heels of an official government campaign to test 15 million people for the AIDS virus. One AIDS activist Mark Heywood states, “I doubt there’s very much testing going on during the strike. The health care service has basically broken down in large parts of the country.” Currently, the government and government workers seem to have deadlocked. Several unions who had not participated in the strike are threatening to join and many marches have been planned. In the interim, the government has had to bring in volunteers and medics from the military to keep the hospitals running.