Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Reuters NewMedia - July 18, 2002
Brendan Boyle
Western Cape province Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk visited the squalid Gugulethu shantytown clinic to announce the project and challenged Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to fall in with the growing national consensus on how to fight the disease.
"This is a first modest step in moving from focusing only on prevention to the treatment of people living with AIDS," he said.
Patients clutching tattered medical files said they had waited since 4:30 in the morning, hoping to see a doctor, but officials said the clinic could do no more for those with AIDS than treat the infections that thrive on their weakened immune systems.
South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, an estimated 4.74 million people. The state's Medical Research Council has warned that up to seven million people could die of AIDS by 2010 if the state does not act.
Van Schalkwyk pulled out of a coalition with the opposition Democratic Alliance last year and led his New National Party (NNP), which built and then dismantled apartheid, into a loose accord with the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Now premier of the country's second-richest province and leader of an NNP-ANC provincial coalition, he has thrown his weight behind most ANC policies, but remains critical on some, including the campaign against AIDS.
Tshabalala-Msimang has said that the antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS are too dangerous and too expensive to prescribe in state hospitals.
She fought all the way to the Constitutional Court to avoid being forced to offer drug therapy to all HIV-positive pregnant women anxious to limit the risk of infecting their babies.
The court has ordered the government to implement mother-to-child prevention programs wherever possible, without delay.
In a statement in April, President Thabo Mbeki's cabinet reversed its blanket opposition to antiretroviral drugs and said it would accelerate their use to limit mother-to-child infection.
Without acknowledging as a certainty that HIV causes AIDS, a widely accepted link that Mbeki has questioned, the cabinet said it would act "on the premise" that the two are linked.
Van Schalkwyk said his provincial government and the British charity Crusaid would co-fund a program in which South African doctors and support staff would give anti-retroviral therapy to 150 adults and children living with AIDS.
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