Daily Mail & Guardian - Johannesburg, South Africa. May 8 2000
Robin Mckie and David Beresford

The panel - meeting in Pretoria - has provoked widespread political and scientific fury because more than half its 33 members are medical heretics. These include US scientists Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick, who deny HIV causes Aids.

The involvement of these dissidents in developing Aids policy in a country in which one in 10 of its 43 million people are HIV-positive, and where rates are expected to rocket to more than 25 per cent this decade, has dismayed scientists and politicians globally.

Virtually all experts agree Aids is caused by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and not poverty, malnutrition and poor sanitation, as the dissidents claim. Dave Scondras, one of the few orthodox scientists on the panel, warned that Mbeki had to accept scientific studies. "The panel should allow the President to move on ... People who deny HIV have never treated Aids, had Aids patients or gone to the funerals of friends with Aids," he said.

Mbeki's bizarre flirtation with the Duesberg heresy was apparently born of a late-night encounter with the dissidents during a presidential cyber-surfing expedition. This led Mbeki to write a letter to various heads of state, including Clinton, in which he compared the treatment of Aids dissidents with the burning of heretics at the stake.

"The day may not be far off when we will once again see books burnt and their authors immolated by fire by those who believe that they may have a duty to conduct a holy campaign against the infidels," he wrote. Horrified US state officials first thought the letter a bizarre hoax. When they saw it was genuine, they leaked it to the the Washington Post.

Just how much sympathy Mbeki's extraordinary views will get from the two Britons on his panel is not hard to judge. From Gordon Stewart, he is likely to get a great deal. Stewart, an emeritus professor at Glasgow University, has made no secret of his open support for Duesberg's stance, and claims there is a conspiracy to prevent such views being made public.

"Colleagues and I attempting to publish have met an unholy alliance intent on rejecting any papers that offer serious criticisms of the orthodoxy," he says. "The mainstream journals and media - whenever they are presented with reasonable doubts about Aids - close ranks like regimented clams."

In fact, Stewart's anti-HIV views were given extraordinary prominence by the Sunday Times in the Nineties when then editor Andrew Neil claimed Britain had only two heroes "when it comes to the truth about Aids". One was Gordon Stewart. (The other was the paper's science writer Neville Hodgkinson.)

Then scientists developed drug cocktails, called protease inhibitors, which disrupted HIV replication and halted the development of Aids in patients. The fact that an anti-HIV drug could be used successfully to treat Aids victims made nonsense of the claims of Stewart and his supporters that the virus had no link with the disease. But they continue to peddle their conspiracy.

The second British scientist on Mbeki's panel is in a very different class. Andrew Herxheimer is a respected pharmacologist - based at the UK Cochrane Centre in Oxford, part of the NHS Research and Development Programme - who believes radical changes should be made to pharmaceutical licensing regulations in order to make them cheaper to manufacture in the Third World.

He has also criticised Glaxo Wellcome, manufacturer of the anti-Aids medicine AZT, for not releasing data from trials with the drug.

Herxheimer has come to the attention of Mbeki and his advisers. They are horrified at the cost of the drug - which is known to help block the transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their children - and have rejected requests for it to be given to pregnant women, even though one in three expectant mothers are now believed to be HIV positive in many parts of South Africa.

Many observers believe Mbeki is in denial. By rejecting any link between HIV and Aids, he can therefore avoid taking the necessary, extremely expensive actions. Medical experts are outraged. "South Africans are burying husbands, wives, relations and friends every day," said Ashraf Grimwood, chair of the country's Nationals Aids Convention in New Scientist last week. "People are terrified."

The influence of scientists such as Herxheimer, and other 'orthodox' panel members such as Scondras and the French scientist and co-discoverer of HIV, Luc Montagnier, will therefore be crucial in dissuading Mbeki from his current Aids policy, and in saving thousands of lives.

It would also stem widespread criticism of Mbeki. Professor Mamphela Ramphele of Cape Town University, a doctor, has warned there is a "lack of respect for a scientific base for health care planning" in South Africa coupled with a "subtle but visible anti-intellectualism seeping into the body politic". The government stance on Aids was "nothing short of irresponsibility, for which history will judge it severely".

What worries many intellectuals in South Africa is the manner in which Mbeki, after centralising political power in an expanded presidency, has isolated himself within a phalanx of 'yes men' and has shown himself intolerant of press criticism. Meanwhile, Aids continues to ravage his country.

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