Distribution of AIDS in Africa
The decision of South African Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, and leading South African scientists to openly challenge the governing ANC party on its deeply flawed record on AIDS recently in The Lancet must be embraced.
Although the roots of that country’s dysfunctional health system has some inheritance in policies from apartheid dispossession and even colonial subjugation, the basic problem has been Thabo Mbeki’s bizarre and seemingly unshakable belief that HIV did not cause AIDS.
This fallacy was compounded by management failures of another HIV denialist, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies.
In reality, South Africa, with less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, now bears 17 per cent of the world’s burden of HIV infection. It has more HIV-infected people than any other nation.
A recent study by Harvard University estimates that Mbeki’s government could have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade, if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients. The ANC health policy was also blamed for failing to administer drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies. The scientific attitudes of South African’s new Health Minister Barbara Hogan to expand efforts to prevent mothers from infecting their babies, and to discourage people from having multiple sexual partners, is indeed welcome and should be rewarded.
The fact that routine circumcision has already been proven in South Africa to more than halve their risk of infection could help the government achieve its goal of halving new infections.
Hopefully this is the start of a new South African dawn.
