JOHANNESBURG, Nov 6 (AFP) - AIDS activists in South Africa have given the government a four-month ultimatum to implement a treatment plan and provide anti-AIDS drugs or face a civil disobedience campaign, a spokesman said Wednesday.
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) spokesman Nathan Geffen said the plan, which it hoped to finalise by the start of December, would include giving anti-retroviral treatment to everybody in the country unable to afford it.
"The TAC will start a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience of government has not adopted an HIV/AIDS treatment plan that included anti-retroviral therapy, by the end of February 2003," Geffen said.
"This will include sit-ins, hunger strikes, the illegal importation of medicine and the illegal distribution of medicine," he told AFP.
Geffen said the TAC, an AIDS lobby group, originally planned to start the campaign on December 1, but after a meeting with South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, decided to hold off until February.
"In our meeting with Deputy President Zuma, he stated that the government needed until February to adopt a treatment plan," Geffen said.
Geffen said however that the TAC did not expect the government to be able immediately to treat large numbers of infected people.
"There should be a gradual roll-out of the programme. We want the government to have the capacity to treat 100,000 people in the public sector by March, 2004," he said.
South Africa's highest judicial authority in July denied government leave to appeal against a High Court ruling forcing it to give anti-AIDS drugs to all HIV-postive pregnant women.
In a case brought by the TAC, Pretoria's high court in December 2001 ordered the state to give the anti-retroviral drug Nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women to limit the risk of their passing the virus on to their babies.
South Africa President Thabo Mbeki has in the past walked into a storm of protest from AIDS activists here after he said he doubted whether HIV causes AIDS and stating that anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous.
But the South African government has softened its stance in the last few months, and in October announced it was "actively engaged in challenges to be overcome to create the conditions that would make it feasible and effective to use anti-retrovirals in the public health sector."
"We are working to lower the costs of these drugs, at present too costly for universal access, and to strengthen the health system to ensure that the drugs are not used incorrectly in ways that can cause harm," the government said at the time.
In South Africa, close to five million people, one in nine, are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS or have full-blown AIDS.
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