Panafrican News Agency - December 2, 2001

The weekly Financial Gazette newspaper, quoting a medical doctor, reported last week that six unnamed ministers in Harare were among 500 people who were using a variety of anti-retroviral drugs to prolong their lives.

The report powerfully drove home warnings by doctors that AIDS was still spreading at alarming rates among Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people, with some estimates predicting zero population growth next year due to the disease.

Elaborate media and other anti-AIDS campaigns, undertaken for years by the government and local and international NGOs, seem to have done little to change the risky multiple sexual behaviour of most Zimbabweans, the main mode of AIDS transmission in the country.

The result is a health crisis of unprecedented proportion in the country as WHO estimates that up to 25 percent of adults in Zimbabwe had AIDS and deaths from the disease had risen from about 2,500 weekly a few years ago to a current level of about 5,000 per week.

AIDS campaigners partly blame the government's refusal, for years, to licence some drugs particularly those that prevent the transmission of the disease from mother to the unborn child, for blunting their efforts to combat AIDS.

Until recently, AIDS drugs widely used elsewhere were illegal, and new drug use approval in Zimbabwe is a lengthy process, which campaigners want the government to review to help combat the disease.

"Most of the deaths from AIDS in Zimbabwe which we are witnessing are unnecessary. People are dying from TB (tuberculosis) and pneumonia and this should not be happening," said Frank Guni, a medical doctor, who is also a leading AIDS campaigner and is HIV positive.

He said politicians, especially those infected with AIDS, could immensely help fight the spread of the disease if they could come out openly and show fellow citizens that no one, irrespective of status, was immune from AIDS.

"If one of the ministers was to come out and say they had AIDS, it would make a great difference to the nation because people would start to realise that the disease is not only for the poor, but can also affect the rich and powerful," Guni said.

"It (disclosure of AIDS status by politicians) will help a lot of ordinary people because they will know that you can continue with life even at that high level with the disease," said Solomon Mutetwa, another AIDS campaigner, who is also a medical doctor.

"It will help tremendously because people will know that after all, AIDS is not a death sentence because our people still think being HIV-positive is a death sentence and are afraid even to go for testing," he added.

But as Zimbabwe joined other nations in marking World AIDS Day with pomp and ceremony, there remained a growing realisation in the country that the battle against the disease will be lost unless all stakeholders involved in the fight derived new strategies to change the public's sexual behaviour.
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