CAPE TOWN, Dec 7 (AFP) - The fight against AIDS is expected to figure high on the agenda in talks on Friday between South African President Thabo Mbeki and visiting US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, her aides said.

Mbeki's questioning of the link between HIV and AIDS caused consternation among the world scientific community this year.

He told South Africa's parliament: "a virus cannot cause a syndrome," and appointed a presidential advisory panel on AIDS which included dissident scientists dismissed as cranks by the mainstream medical world.

"It's sure the issue of HIV/AIDS will come up, and perhaps prominently in their discussion," a senior state department official said as Albright arrived in Cape Town Thursday evening for a swansong tour of South Africa, Mauritius and Botswana.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, stressed however that the United States was focusing not on the controversy, and the often angry debate it prompted in South Africa, "but more importantly on the programmes and the strategy that the government of South Africa has put in place".

The programmes, calling for abstinence, fidelity and the use of condoms, are based on the premise that HIV does indeed cause AIDS.

"For the most part we have found this strategy to be well conceived, and one we want very much to be in a position to support," the official said.

This country has the world's greatest number of HIV-positive inhabitants -- 4.2 million, or one in 10 South Africans at the end of 1999, according to government figures.

Albright is due to visit an AIDS research centre Friday at a hospital in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, then go on to Pretoria for talks with Mbeki.

He raised the subject during a visit to Washington last May, when he met President Bill Clinton.

That followed a letter he wrote to Clinton on AIDS on April 3 which was leaked to the Washington Post.

The newspaper said it so stunned US officials that the administration restricted its distribution, fearing it would touch off an international controversy.

In the five-page letter, Mbeki made an impassioned defense of California biologist Peter Duesberg, a member of his panel, who theorises that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS and that the widely used anti-retroviral drugs AZT and Nevirapine do more harm than good in treating the disease.

Mbeki insisted on his government's right to consult dissident scientists and accused unnamed foreign critics of waging a "campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism" akin to "the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed".

US officials said then that they feared Mbeki's views could sway other African nations, since South Africa is seen as a leader on the continent.

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