Inter Press Service - July 10, 2000
Farah Khan

The mega-gathering of activists, governments, donors and various United Nations agencies exploded on day one as an HIV- positive judge took on Mbeki who Sunday night again declared that poverty and inequality is the major cause of the unmanageable proportions Aids has taken on in Africa.

"In our national struggle to come to terms with the epidemic, perhaps the most intractably puzzling episode has been our president's flirtation with those, who in the face of all reason and evidence, sought to dispute the etiology of Aids,"said Judge Edwin Cameron in a conference address.

Since late last year, Mbeki has sought support for a so-called "dissident" view that the HIV virus is not the main cause of Aids.

Instead, the South African president has splashed millions of Rands in convening an Aids panel which is meant to re-test theories of Aids causation in Africa by focusing on the impact of poverty on the spread of the disease.

A recent edition of African Agenda magazine supported Mbeki's views. The magazine reported on research which showed that Aids statistics in Africa are far less reliable than those gathered in the developed world and that the diseases of poverty (like TB, malaria and kwashiokor) were often taken to indicate Aids.

This led to the "medicalisation of sub-Saharan poverty" argued African Agenda and meant that the structural causes of poverty and inequality got wiped from the international agenda.

But Mbeki's views have drawn worldwide condemnation from the international Aids lobby which argues that such questioning can unravel HIV-prevention programmes. "This [Mbeki's stance] has shaken almost everyone responsible for engaging the epidemic. It has created an air of unbelief amongst scientists, confusion among those at risk of HIV and consternation amongst Aids workers," said Cameron.

Later on Monday Health Minister, Manto Tshabala-Msimang, angrily sprung to Mbeki's defence, insisting that he has never said that HIV does not cause Aids. The debate on the causes of Aids has inflamed tempers and added fire to the belly of activists who are also using the conference to wage a battle with the multinationals pharmaceutical companies which manufacture Aids drugs.

On Sunday, delegates and Durban activists, under the auspices of the Treatment Action Campaign, marched through the streets to demand access to the expensive but effective Aids drugs which have seen the disease downgraded from a killer to a chronic disease in the West.

On Monday activists gate crashed a media briefing by United Nations agency, UNAIDS, and the pharmaceutical industry on Monday and took it over.

"When will we have cheap drugs? Your programme is appalling," the representatives of the international NGO Act Up told drug companies.

They estimate that 95 percent of Aids sufferers cannot afford the drugs nor the complementary treatment needed to make them effective. The activists argue that while drug companies are now coming to the table, it's too little too late.

A Merck representative said his company was involved in negotiations with various governments to draw up treatment programmes. Glaxo said they were still negotiating with governments to reduce the prices of drugs like AZT which can prevent transmission if taken early.

In May, five major multinational pharmaceutical companies offered a 75 percent cut in price of their Aids drugs. The offer has not yet been accepted at scale because consensus is developing among activists that the only way to provide affordable drugs is through parallel manufacturing: to provide generics to the HIV-positive poor and to Aids sufferers in the South.

This means that the focus of organisations like Act Up is increasingly going to fall on calling for the drug companies to allow licensing of their patents in developing countries.

Meanwhile Cameron also fast emerged as the white knight of the conference and an eloquent spokesperson for Aids sufferers in Africa. He decried a world in which miracle drugs are available but denied those who need them.

"Available treatments are denied to those who need them for the sake of aggregating corporate wealth for shareholders, who by African standards are already unimaginably affluent."

"That cannot be right, and it cannot be allowed to happen...can we at this conference say that we bear no responsibility for 30- million people in resource-poor countries who face death from Aids unless medical care and treatment is made accessible to them?," the judge asked. (END/IPS/fk/sm/00)
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