Up to 40 percent of people may have the HIV virus in South Africa due to governmental and social factors, says cultural anthropologist Dr. Margaret Winchester in her lecture “Therapeutic Landscapes in South Africa: an interdisciplinary study of health.”

Winchester, who is a candidate for an adjunct professor position at Dickinson, discussed “the ways in which people living with health vulnerabilities navigate healthcare systems and structural constraints,” according to the Dickinson College website.

“At least six million people in the country of South Africa are living with HIV…which is the most of any country in the world,” explains Winchester.

Through research team surveys and studies, Winchester says she found that the health care systems in South Africa are struggling because of governmental influence on the withholding of treatment for people with HIV.

“Thabo Mbeki, who was the president after Nelson Mandela, decided along with a team of wacky advisors that HIV does not cause AIDS,” Winchester says. “He stopped people from getting treatment for a very long time.”

According to Winchester, social pressures discourage people from openly expressing having HIV, which may play a vital role in the spread of the disease and leads to reluctance in seeking treatment.

Meta Bowman, academic coordinator of the Department of Health Studies says the lecture was a preliminary test for the adjunct professor position.

“We are bringing her [Winchester] to lecture as part of our interview process for hiring for a position in the Health Studies Department,” says Bowman.

Isabelle Troutman ’17, a health studies major, had a mixed reaction to the presentation.

“I think that she (Winchester) was nervous but she had very interesting research and I think she’ll be an interesting candidate [for the position].”

Winchester also emphasized how her research affects Dickinson College students.

“There are some very direct benefits of learning about it,” says Winchester. “Learning about health disparities and how other systems respond to them, it can have this mutual learning and broaden students’ horizons.”

Winchester works as a research associate in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at the Pennsylvania State University.  She says she spent her post-doctoral work examining health care systems in Uganda, before becoming a researcher at PSU.

The event took place at Stafford Auditorium on Tuesday, Nov. 8 at 5 p.m. Around 15 people attended the presentation, which was sponsored by the Health Studies Department.