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 In this Special Report from Beat It! 1999 episode 2 the team investigated what the implications would have been if HIV was to be made a notifiable disease.
In the 6th episode of the 1999 series the Beat It! team looked at the hope and promise of antiretroviral medication. Justice Edwin Cameron spoke openly about how these drugs saved his life and how his viral load became undetectable.
In this episode the Beat It! team looked at the state of HIV/AIDS advocacy in South Africa.
"People who support me are very sad, they are sad because they know that I won't take treatment. And the reason I won't take treatment is because the vast majority of people with HIV/AIDS in our country...cannot afford to be healthy."
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In this episode we looked at how a badly run public healthcare system unnecessarily put people's health at risk when treatment was available.
With an overt political angle this episode of Beat It! looked at the reasons why the successes of the Khayelitsha PMTCT programme were not being rolled out nationally. The results of not rolling out the PMTCT programme was then driven home in an emotional Support Group discussion in which mothers who have lost their babies through mother-to-child-transmission shared their experiences.
In this Beat It! episode the economic implications of not rolling out an antiretroviral treatment plan were looked at. Clem Sunter of Anglo American spoke about the true cost of having an ailing workforce that might need to be replaced on an ongoing basis because of AIDS not being treated.
In this episode we again look at how access to the antifungal drug Diflucan could have saved Christopher Moraka's life. In line with this we followed Zackie Achmat to Thailand where he bought 3000 tablets of generic fluconazole as part of the Christopher Moraka Defiance Camapign against Patent Abuse.
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 In this Special Report we accompanied Zackie Achmat, Mathew Damane and others to Brazil to learn more about generic drug.
In the Special Report we spoke to nurses and looked at the burden they carry because of the strain placed on the healthcare system that wasn't yet making life-saving antiretroviral medication readily availbale.
This episode, the last in this series, covered the TAC COSATU Treatment Congress that was held in Durban from the 27th to the 29th of June 2002. Numerous civil society and faith based organisations spoke with one voice and called for the roll-out of antiretroviral therapy in the public sector. |
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In 2004/2005, 306 rapes cases were reported in Khayelitsha alone. The 306 reported rapes however do not give a true reflection of the incidence of rape in this community as 42% of Rape Crisis clients did not report their rapes to the SAPS in the same year. Nationally only 7 - 9% of perpetrators of reported rape cases are convicted and between 40 - 60% of all reported rape cases are withdrawn. What can and should be done to address this social ill? In this episode the group, with the Lorna Mlofana's case as study, reflected on how sustained community mobilisation can ensure justice.
On the 22nd of August 2006 Senator Barack Obama, during a tour of Africa, visited South Africa and met with members of the Treatment Action Campaign in Khayelitsha. He also visited Site B Clinic in Khayelitsha were he saw the work that TAC's Treatment Literacy Practitioners do on a daily basis in clinics across the country. During the closed session of their meeting TAC members suggested to Senator Obama that he run for president. Obama took a strong position on preventing and treating HIV/AIDS and was critical of the South African government's response to the epidemic and their disregard and animosity towards the Treatment Action Campaign.
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Patient Abuse follows the events leading up to the formation of the Treatment Action Campaign and their struggles to access affordable quality treatment for all South Africans, by challenging the patent laws protecting the profits of multinational drug companies. Patient Abuse tells of how the Treatment Action Campaign grew from a handful of people on the steps of St Georges Cathedral to an organisation of thousands with support from activists around the globe. In April of 2001 the TAC was victorious when the PMA withdrew it's case.
Law and Freedom
Director: Zackie Achmat
Part 1: Who Was Mrs Komani? relates the dramatic cases that led to the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of sodomy, a ruling that acknowledged the equality of gay and lesbian people. These judgments stand in contrast to the legal execution, harassment and persecution of apartheid era law. However, even under apartheid, as human rights lawyer Geoff Budlender explains: "Law was a limit on power" and so spaces arose in which people could use the law to contest the abuse of power. One key example explored in the film is that of Mr and Mrs Komani whose 1980 case was a key cause of the collapse of the hated Pass Laws. Who Was Mrs. Komani? brings to light the people who made possible these cases which have dramatically affected the lives of our people and the history of our country.
Part 2: It’s a Nice Country! We meet courageous women and men who have used the Constitution to build democracy and a better life for all. First, we meet Irene Grootboom whose struggle for housing culminated in a landmark ruling of the Constitutional Court that is seen as crucial for the establishment of greater socio-economic rights. In the case of Ngxuza and others v the Eastern Cape Provincial Government, we meet the Meltafas, who even in the new democratic order, had to challenge abuse of power when their grants were unlawfully withdrawn. When labeled a troublemaker by officials, Mrs Meltafa responds, "You have been sleeping, I have woken you up!". It’s a Nice Country! also explores the case of the Treatment Action Campaign’s battle for the use of antiretrovirals to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. In this personal reading of the "Nevirapine case," Achmat pays tribute to TAC members who, through their work of education and community mobilisation, used the Constitution to achieve access to life saving treatment.
Media, Method, Message follows the story of Beat It! the worlds first HIV/AIDS magazine programme. Narrated by the shows co-creator and director Jack Lewis, we see how Beat It! worked towards removing the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS and addressed the concerns of real people living with AIDS through documentary inserts and an in studio HIV+ support group.
The Treatment Action Campaign “in less than five years of existence moved a nation, shifted government policy and advanced the rights of people with HIV everywhere in the world… TAC’s struggle grows out of the best traditions of the anti-apartheid movement. TAC will be a shining light for citizen action for decades to come.” - Graca Machel, on presenting TAC with the Nelson Mandela, Health and Human Rights Award in 2002.
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 Nelson Mandela visited Zackie Achmat with the intention to ask him to reconsider commencing antiretroviral therapy. Zackie respectfully refused Mandela's request prompting Mandela to say in a press conference after their meeting that Zackie "is a role model and his action is based on fundamental principles, which we all admire." "People far beyond our borders are aware of the principled stand that he has taken. It would have been feeble for me to come to him to say: "I want you now to change; to take drugs," because his position is that as long as drugs are not available to everybody especially the poor, he will not take them."
President Motlanthe appointed Barbara Hogan to the position of Minister of Health. This move by the third democratically elected President of South Africa signalled that government's disastrous approach to HIV/AIDS had ended. Sadly over two million South Africans died of AIDS during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki and the tenure of Tshabalala-Msimang. At least 300,000 deaths could have been avoided had they merely met the most basic constitutional requirements.
 Sipho Mthathi, Fatima Hassan and Zackie Achmat discuss the objection by the South African government to the participation of the Treatment Action Camapign and the AIDS Law Project in the United Nations' General Assembly Special Session on AIDS.The TAC and the ALP were two of six organisations that had been prevented from accreditation through the deliberate intervention of UN member states. Namibia and Belarus were the only other two countries that exercised objections. Hundreds of organisations from across the world had been accredited because their governments did not choose to exercise an objection.
The TAC is joined by ex-Westville Prison inmates to talk about the problems facing HIV positive prisoners in accessing treatment. Sifiso talks about how you are not allowed to be tested for HIV unless you are bedridden and how inmates went on a hunger strike to attract attention to the plight of HIV positive inmates. Sipho Mthati talks about how what the Department of Correctional Services is doing is unconstitutional.
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