ELIM – The Treatment Action Campaign recently introduced its new strategic programme aimed at benefiting the masses in the communities.

According to the TAC’s provincial organiser, Oupa Fazi, the Treatment Literacy Programme was established with the sole purpose of training individuals affected by various illnesses about the importance of treatment, prevention, and care. He said that the programme creates a better understanding of science, thereby telling the people how their bodies works, the virus work, prevention (including safer sex)as well as treatment of opportunistic infections.

“As TAC, we have realised that people in the country are using treatment without knowing how it works within their immune systems as well as understanding its contents and side effects, to mention but a few. It is not a privilege for one to know the importance of all treatment irrespective of illnesses, but a right,” he said. Oupa said that Treatment-Literacy also encourages transparency, but condemns discrimination.

He said the more than 100 trained treatment literacy practitioners are often deployed into clinics, schools, hospitals, businesses and community centres to conduct workshops. The provincial TAC organiser further claimed that, if the masses are treatment-literate, they are likely to get counselled and tested for HIV and, where necessary, demand CD4 tests.

In a move to intensify the programme, on March 29 to April 5, two TAC members in Limpopo Province, Joel Ntimbane and Petunia Nkolele, both media officers within TAC, attended a media training communicator’s workshop in Cape Town. The workshop, co-ordinated by the TAC, was focusing mainly on the organisation’s inability to get information from the community, interviewing and writing skills.