| | One of the few things that all South African health workers, administrators, policy-makers and politicians can agree upon is that HIV/AIDS is the predominant health problem facing the evolving national health system. Beyond that, however, the consensus rapidly evaporates. Much of that contestation rests on differing world views of the relationship between health and society, between health as a consequence of economic and social factors and health as a biomedical phenomenon, between health as a right and health as a commodity. In the classic words of Lesley Doyal (1979:44): patterns of health and illness are to a considerable extent determined by a particular mode of social and economic organisation, and under capitalism there is often a contradiction between the pursuit of health and the pursuit of profit. |
