The news on AIDS from Africa is rarely good, and southern Africa usually offers the grimmest tidings. Nonetheless, the feedback from what is being billed as “the most representative HIV/AIDS meeting ever held in” South Africa hints that perhaps things will improve. The meeting, opened in Pretoria today, and will debate the new HIV/AIDS national strategic plan for 2007-2011, which the AIDS Law Project's Mark Heywood hails as “one of the most far-sighted strategic plans on the globe at the moment.” Plans, however celebrated, are one thing, follow-up another, but surely these developments mark a significant step forward in the one region of the world that cannot afford anything else.
