Bay Area Reporter - October 19, 2000
Liz Highleyman

This past spring, Mbeki unleashed a firestorm of controversy when he suggested that HIV might not be the sole and sufficient cause of AIDS in South Africa. Although Mbeki did not categorically deny that HIV was related to AIDS, he suggested that other factors - such as poverty, poor health care, and substandard infrastructure - might influence the high rates of AIDS in his country. Also at issue is whether South Africa should spend scarce public health resources to pay for expensive anti-retroviral drugs, including AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Prior to the XIII International AIDS Conference held in Durban this summer, Mbeki convened an advisory panel made up of both mainstream scientists and so-called HIV dissidents - including the University of California, Berkeley's controversial Professor Peter Duesberg - to study the relationship between the virus and AIDS. The panel is expected to issue a final report by the end of the year. In response, some 5,000 scientists signed the Durban Declaration stating that HIV was the sole cause of AIDS, and several attendees walked out of Mbeki's opening address at the conference in protest.

In recent months, Mbeki has been under increasing pressure - from AIDS treatment activists, labor union leaders, and even former President Nelson Mandela - to acknowledge HIV as the cause of AIDS. Last month the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party publicly declared that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and asked Mbeki to do the same.

Opponents claim that Mbeki's questioning of HIV undermines AIDS prevention programs and discourages people from practicing safer sex. The government recently initiated a $275,000 safer sex campaign and announced that it would investigate the effectiveness of nevirapine (Viramune) in stemming perinatal transmission.

According to government spokesman Joel Netshitenzhe, Mbeki will be "scaling down his direct involvement in the public debate on the science of HIV/AIDS." The announcement follows Mbeki's statement to the South African parliament last month that "The way we have handled this matter might have resulted in confusion." Netshitenzhe said Mbeki was not abandoning the debate, but rather would devote his attention to economic and other issues, saying that the HIV issue "takes up too much of his time." Mbeki has appointed three cabinet ministers to deal with the advisory board. Mbeki's latest decision drew further criticism. According to Treatment Action Campaign spokeswoman Sharon Ekambaram, "To act childishly now and withdraw from any comment is even worse. It is confusing."

Some 4.2 million South Africans are estimated to be infected with HIV, but dissidents question this figure because people with AIDS symptoms are often not tested for the virus and because, they claim, several factors including pregnancy and malaria can lead to false positive HIV antibody tests.

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