How Successful is South Africa in Decreasing Communicable Diseases?

ABSTRACT

The success of the public health sanitation movement included the use of vaccines; and antibiotics led many to assume that all infectious diseases would sooner or later succumb to medical technology and public health measures. Unfortunately this did not happen. Late in the 20th century and now early in the 21st century we see the onset of new communicable diseases such as HIV/ AIDS and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the resurgence of old communicable diseases such as tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. The persistence of measles as a major killer of over one million children per year represents a failure in effective use of both the vaccines and the health systems in developing countries. Nowhere else can we see these problems better than in our own backyard