CAPE TOWN, Feb 20 (AFP) - South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Wednesday said in his budget that the country will spend an extra billion rand on fighting AIDS in 2002, but only a fraction of the money will be spent on anti-retroviral programmes.
This is on top of an estimated four billion rand (350 million dollars / 400 million euros) devoted to HIV and AIDS in existing health and education programmes.
Manuel said the money will pay for awareness campaigns, condoms, hospital and home care for the country's estimated 4.7 million HIV carriers, treatment of opportunistic diseases and "a progressive role-out" of programmes to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
A treasury breakdown of the special AIDS budget shows that more than half of it, about 520 million rand, will go towards improved care, while 25 million rand will be spent on mother-to-child prevention.
The latter amount is little more than last year and shows no plan to expand beyond trials at some 18 clinic the use of the anti-retroviral Nevirapine to prevent women infecting their babies at birth, despite massive pressure to do so.
AIDS activists who marched on parliament Wednesday in protest at the government's policy claim making Nevirapine widely available at ante-natal clinics could save at least 20,000 babies a year.
Treasury officials said the country has only budgeted for a nationwide Nevirapine programme in 2004 when funding for the programme will reach 155 million rand (13.6 million dollars / 15.6 million euros).
But budget forecasts for the next three years make no provision for anti-retroviral treatment to be made available to other HIV carriers through the public health system, with officials arguing that would have doubled the health budget.
"It is beyond what we can afford. It would cost 10,000 rand a year to give ARV treatment to one person with HIV and we would need about 40 billion rand for that," one told AFP.
Manuel said additional funds allocated to fighting AIDS will be increased to 1.8 billion rand (158 million dollars / 181 million euros) in the 2003 bud
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