The Chicago Tribune - May 5, 2000
Paul Salopek, Tribune Foreign Correspondent

The panel, set up by President Thabo Mbeki to help guide South Africa through one of the worst AIDS crises in Africa, includes Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick, the U.S. leaders of a small group of scientists who believe AIDS is not linked to HIV. Other "AIDS skeptics" from the U.S. and Canada also are included on the panel, which convenes this weekend.

Mbeki's consultations with dissident researchers, whose hypotheses largely are dismissed by mainstream scientists, have scandalized the international AIDS community in recent months. Mbeki made headlines two weeks ago when he defended his views in a letter to President Clinton and other heads of state.

"[The] government's view is that blind acceptance of conventional wisdom would be irresponsible," the South African Ministry of Health said Wednesday in a statement announcing the composition of the advisory panel. "After all, orthodox understanding and responses have not met with great success elsewhere in Africa."

South Africa's AIDS panel will meet sporadically for two months, government sources say, before issuing recommendations for controlling the epidemic.

More than two-thirds of the people who carry HIV, the virus that most scientists associate with AIDS, live in Africa. About 4 million South Africans, or about 10 percent of the population, are HIV-positive and will die within a decade unless a cure is found.

"I have voiced my objections to this panel from the beginning," said Jerry Coovadia, a South African medical researcher and chairman of the world's Thirteenth International AIDS Conference, set for July in Durban.

"We don't need to prove any longer whether HIV causes AIDS," Coovadia said. "That's an old and discredited debate. What this panel is doing is cruel, because it deflects our attention from the real urgent problem of finding real treatments for the disease."

Coovadia added that with the government's AIDS panel divided almost equally between dissident and orthodox scientists, the discussions are prone to deadlock in any case.

AIDS doubters such as Duesberg believe the AIDS epidemic is a combination of more mundane illnesses caused by recreational drug use and poverty. Their arguments appear mostly in Web sites.

On the mainstream side, the panel includes high-powered researchers such as Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the HIV-AIDS link.

Doctors from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta also have been invited, as has Helene Gayle, the assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service.

The U.S. panelists were on their way to South Africa and could not be reached for comment.
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