(This Opinion column ran on Nature’s news site on November 3, 2006. You can see the original post here.)
It’s about time that this country hard-hit by AIDS promised help for the afflicted, says Apoorva Mandavilli.
HIV causes AIDS. That’s not news to you or me, but shockingly it has taken years for the government in South Africa — where about 1,000 people die of AIDS every day — to acknowledge that fact and pledge to provide medicines.
In the past few weeks, the country’s deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has publicly promised to expand access to AIDS tests, antiretroviral drugs and prevention programmes to those who most need them.
That sounds sensible — if a rather obvious thing for a politician to say — but it’s a far cry from what South Africans had heard until recently.
Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has extolled the virtues of beetroot, lemon juice and garlic in fighting AIDS. At the international AIDS conference in Toronto this August, her booth prominently featured those items. Six years earlier, at the same conference in Durban, President Thabo Mbeki said he didn’t know anyone with AIDS and questioned its link to HIV.
It’s about time the government changed its tune. As the richest country in Africa, South Africa is in a much better position to combat AIDS than its poorer neighbours. But thanks to the government’s appalling neglect, it hasn’t seen any decline in the rate of new infections.