Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - July 14, 2000
Ulysses Torassa, Examiner Medical Writer
"Let us not equivocate: a tragedy of unprecedented proportions is unfolding in Africa," Mandela said Friday. "Decades have been chopped from life expectancy - half of our young people will die of AIDS."
Mandela took pains not to criticize current President Thabo Mbeki, whose speech opening the conference on Sunday was a major disappointment to delegates. They had hoped he would back away from his interest in the ideas of dissidents who do not believe HIV causes of AIDS.
Mandela said the controversy surrounding the issue has created a distraction from the life and death issues facing Africa and the world.
"The ordinary people of the continent and the world - and particularly the poor who on our continent will again carry a disproportionate burden of this scourge - would, if anybody cared to ask their opinions, wish that the dispute about the primacy of politics or science be put on the back burner and we proceed to address the needs and concerns of those suffering and dying," Mandela said.
Mandela is revered as a moral authority in South Africa and around the world, having endured 27 years in prison under the former apartheid government and then leading the country into a non-racial democracy. However, it has been noted that he failed to give much attention to the growing AIDS epidemic while he was president from 1994 to 1999.
He drew his greatest applause when he endorsed programs to give anti-retroviral therapy to pregnant women and newborns to cut the chances they will become infected. The South African government has been criticized for resisting such measures, claiming first that the drugs were too toxic and later that not enough evidence had been gathered to justify approving them.
"Introducing measures to reduce mother-to-child transmission have been proven to be essential in the fight against AIDS," Mandela said. He called for implementing them on a large scale.
He also said he would direct his foundation to get more involved in the battle against AIDS. Mandela's talk was "music to our ears," said conference chair Hoosen Coovadia, who had not hidden his disappointment with Mbeki's earlier talk. Mandela's speech, he said, "has answered so many unspoken and spoken questions. It has stirred us."
Some delegates were ecstatic with Mandela's uncompromising and compassionate speech.
"Brilliant," said Backson Muchino of Zimbabwe. "Just what I was hoping to hear."
"It stirred me emotionally," said Nomcebo Mkhize of Durban, a student who has been involved with AIDS issues. While much of the talk surrounding the conference has been about getting expensive and complex anti-retroviral drugs to poor nations, she was pleased to hear Mandela focus more on the human dimension of the epidemic, and the need to embrace people who are suffering with the disease.
And she said his endorsement of programs to cut transmission of the virus from mothers to infants will carry a lot of weight with the government.
"Mandela is seen as the most important person in this country. It will speed up the process," of getting such programs off the ground, she said.
Daynese Santos, a physician's assistant at the Grady Infectious Disease Center in Atlanta, said she and others wept during portions of the speech.
"We needed that," she said. "He pulled us all together as a community."
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