Hearing community voices: grassroots perceptions of an intervention to support health volunteers in South Africa.

With the scarcity of African health professionals, volunteers are earmarked for an increased role in HIV/AIDS management, with a growing number of projects relying on grassroots community members to provide home nursing care to those with AIDS - as part of the wider task-shifting agenda. Yet little is known about how best to facilitate such involvement. This paper reports on community perceptions of a 3-year project which sought to train and support volunteer health workers in a rural community in South Africa.

Extended family childcare arrangements in a context of AIDS: collapse or adaptation?

Families are subjected to a number of social, economic, political and demographic challenges. In recent years, the AIDS epidemic has constituted a major challenge for already poor families due to its wide reaching social, economic and health consequences. The devastating consequence of HIV and AIDS is being seen through the prolonged illness and death of family members of prime working age which impacts on family livelihoods and the ability to provide for and protect its members.

Representations of HIV/AIDS management in South African newspapers.

In South Africa, numerous strong policy statements emphasise the importance of involving communities in HIV/AIDS management, yet in practice such involvement tends to be tokenistic and minimal. Social representations in the public sphere constitute the symbolic dimension within which responses to HIV and AIDS are conceptualised and transformed into action. Through an analysis of newspaper articles, we explore the dominant representations of HIV/AIDS management circulating in the South African public sphere and examine how community engagement is depicted.

Gender, famine and HIV/AIDS: rethinking new variant famine in Malawi.

Although making a large and rapid impact on our understandings of the interactions between famine and HIV/AIDS, the new variant famine hypothesis has had little critical scrutiny. This paper uses a case study of the Malawian food crisis of 2001/2002 to contribute to understandings of new variant famine (NVF). The critical approach argues that a consideration for gender - the socially constructed relationship between men and women - needs to be central to understanding the interactions between HIV/AIDS and famine, which the NVF hypothesis seeks to explain.

Comparison of the specificity and sensitivity of traditional methods for assessment of nephrotoxicity in the rat with metabonomic and proteomic methodologies.

There is currently a great deal of scientific interest and debate concerning the possible advantages that proteomic and metabonomic technologies might have over traditional biomarkers of toxicity (blood and urine chemistry, histopathology). Numerous papers have been published that make impressive claims concerning potential applications for these novel technologies, however there appears to be little hard evidence in the literature of their advantages over the traditional techniques for assessing toxicity. The aim of this review was to evaluate the relative sensitivity and specificity of proteomic and metabonomic techniques, compared with traditional techniques, for assessing xenobiotic-induced nephrotoxicity.