Cape Town — The head of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Olive Shisana, has called on government to prioritise treatment for HIV-positive teachers and nurses, saying the country cannot afford to let these key service providers die.

"There is not a single policy or programme that targets these groups ... you have a crisis com-ing and you can't sit back and treat them like everybody else," she said in a telephone interview.

Shisana's comments come after a study published this week by the SA Medical Journal (SAMJ) shows that one in seven nurses and nursing students in the public sector is HIV positive.

Researchers tested more than 1500 of the 2032 staff at the Helen Joseph and Coronation hospitals in Gauteng. It found that 11,5% of them were infected with HIV. Nurses aged 25-34 were hardest hit, with a fifth of them living with the virus.

The findings build on research that the health department commissioned from the HSRC, published in 2004, which found HIV prevalence among healthcare workers surveyed in four provinces to be 11%.

A separate HRSC study commissioned by the education department found that almost 13% of public sector teachers were infected with the virus. The rates are similar to estimates for the general population.

Shisana said the argument that healthcare workers should use the same clinics as the general population and stand in long queues waiting for treatment "didn't make sense".

"You want to make sure they get priority so that they can deliver services to other people."

The health department's head of HIV/AIDS, Dr Nomonde Xundu, said it would be unfair for government to prioritise a select group of professionals.

"Yes, they are important, but everyone deserves to be prioritised," she said.

Shisana also criticised the health department for failing to use research it had commissioned in developing policies, saying its human resources plan had ignored the effects of the HIV epidemic on health-care professionals and consequently set training targets that were too low to meet the demand.

In a hard-hitting editorial in the SAMJ, Shisana used the latest research and the 2004 HRSC study to extrapolate the national impact of HIV/AIDS on public sector healthcare workers.

According to her calculations, 5806 health-care workers were HIV positive, and among them were 2745 nurses who were sick enough to have developed AIDS or opportunistic infections.

She said that the current annual production of nurses was less than 2000, and the department's human resources plan set an annual training target of only 3000 by 2011.

"This is even before we consider emigration by nurses, or their exit to other professions. To develop a national strategy on human resources and not take into account the effects of HIV/AIDS on health-care workers is really alarming," she said.