Neurological complications of human immunodeficiency virus infection in Zimbabwe-2005.

Zimbabwe is a high prevalence area for HIV infection, and provides opportunities for studying complications of AIDS in both antiretroviral naive and treated groups of patients. Figures for HIV prevalence are among the highest in the world, but the number of people receiving treatment is very small. Economic and political factors contribute to this important health crisis.

Priority setting in a hospital critical care unit: qualitative case study.

Objective: To describe priority setting for admissions in a hospital critical care unit and to evaluate it using the ethical framework of "accountability for reasonableness.

Design: Qualitative case study and evaluation using the ethical framework of accountability for reasonableness.

Setting: A medical/surgical intensive care unit in a large urban university-affiliated teaching hospital in Toronto, Canada.

The surgeon and human immunodeficiency virus.

The moral dilemmas faced by surgeons worldwide who treat patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can be viewed against the background of experience in sub-Saharan countries, where the community prevalence is in excess of 25% (90% of hospital inpatients). When seeking consent for an HIV test before surgery, frank communication regarding the surgeons' perspective of risks to themselves and the patient is helpful. When consent for a test must be obtained from a substitute decision-maker, the surgeon should consider if the patient would want the decision-maker to know the result.

Rapid emergence of resistance to penicillin and trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole in invasive Streptococcus pneumoniae in Zimbabwe.

Pneumococcal pneumonia and meningitis are common infectious disease problems in people who are HIV seropositive in southern Africa. For many years two inexpensive antibiotics, penicillin and trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole (TMP-SMX) had been effective in treatment, but recently resistance to these agents has been reported from many parts of the world. This study was designed to determine the antimicrobial resistance patterns in invasive pneumococci from hospital patients in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Cryptococcus neoformans meningoencephalitis in African children with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

Background: The number of children with AIDS in Africa is high. Such children may be at risk for cryptococcal meningoencephalitis, but data are scarce regarding this disease in our population.

Methods: We examined records of HIV-infected children (< or =16 years) diagnosed with cryptococcal meningoencephalitis in Harare, Zimbabwe, between 1995 and 2000.