South Africa, devastated by AIDS, rejects voodoo theories of AIDS denialists
windinghighway
New York Times October 31, 2009
JOHANNESBURG — Culminating his party’s momentous shift on AIDS, a
disease that has led to plunging life expectancies here, President
Jacob Zuma last week definitively rejected his predecessor’s denial of
the viral cause of AIDS and of the critical role of antiretroviral
drugs in treating it.
Almost 10 years to the day after President Thabo Mbeki first suggested
that AIDS drugs could pose “a danger to health” in an Oct. 28, 1999,
speech in Parliament, Mr. Zuma declared Thursday in precisely the same
chamber, “Knowledge will help us to confront denialism and the stigma
attached to the disease.”
In a country that now has more HIV-infected people and annual AIDS
deaths than any other, Mr. Zuma’s clarion call for a battle against
the disease, six months into his term as president, led to rejoicing
among advocates who had long sought such national leadership.
Mr. Zuma said in his address: “All South Africans must know that they
are at risk and must take informed decisions to reduce their
vulnerability to infection or, if infected, to slow the advance of the
disease. Most importantly, all South Africans need to know their
H.I.V. status, and be informed of the treatment options available to
them.”
After Mr. Mbeki’s ouster from the presidency a year ago by his own
party, the African National Congress, which has governed the country
since 1994, a caretaker president appointed a new health minister,
Barbara Hogan, who said in an interview that what she called “the era
of denialism” was over.
Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, her successor as health minister under Mr. Zuma,
has accepted the government’s responsibility for past failings and
begun charting a more comprehensive approach to the AIDS crisis here.
Plain-spoken national leadership has proven critical to combating the
disease in Uganda, Kenya and Botswana — and disastrous where it was
lacking, as here in South Africa. Harvard researchers estimated that
South Africa could have prevented 365,000 premature deaths if it had
acted sooner to provide antiretroviral drugs to treat people with AIDS
and to prevent H.I.V.-positive women from infecting their newborns.
In his speech, Mr. Zuma laid out the horrifying toll of AIDS in South
Africa.
Overall deaths registered in South Africa in 2008 jumped to 756,000
from 573,000 the year before, posing the real possibility, he said,
that the number of deaths annually could eventually outnumber births.
The electoral commission had to remove 396,336 dead voters from the
rolls in September 2008 and August 2009.
Life expectancy for South African men is 51, compared with 70 in
Algeria and 60 in Senegal, Mr. Zuma said.
“These are some of the chilling statistics that demonstrate the
devastating impact that H.I.V. and AIDS is having on our nation,” he
said. “Not even the youngest are spared.”
And though the country now has a strategy to fight the disease and the
largest antiretroviral treatment program on earth, he said: “We are
not yet winning this battle. We must come to terms with this reality
as South Africans.”
He also called for “a massive mobilization campaign” that spurs South
Africans to safeguard their health, educates them about the risks and
converts “knowledge into a change of behavior.”
However, Mr. Zuma did not go into detail about the behavior changes
that were needed. Many anti-AIDS advocates hope that the president
will speak out about the dangers of multiple sexual partners and urge
people to take the difficult, and in some cases culturally charged,
steps that could help prevent the spread of HIV: condom use and male
circumcision, which more than halves the risk of infection for men,
among other things. Mr. Zuma is Zulu, the country’s largest ethnic
group, which does not generally practice circumcision.
Mr. Zuma said in his speech that the country was developing additional
measures to strengthen its AIDS programs, and vowed that on World AIDS
day, Dec. 1, the country would begin what he called a “renewed
onslaught against this epidemic.”
john
"windinghighway" <winding...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:8bacc826-bdce-4442...@a31g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
Zuma Rallies S. Africa to Fight AIDS
There's a surprise, we can trust old Zuma can't we
http://www.whale.to/aids.html