Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 16, 2006
Edwin Cameron

The most important fact about Aids is good news - the hope-filled fact that Aids is no longer a necessarily fatal condition

WHEN the judges announced last month that Adam Levin and I had jointly won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, I recalled that in Hollywood some years they say there's "an Oscar for the issue".

While Adam and I will willingly believe anyone who tells us that we out-wrote the other entries, the truth is that we also had The Issue on our side. For Aids - a virally caused illness - is dealing misery and death across our sub-continent; and sometimes we still flounder as we try to come to terms with its political, economic and psychological impact.

The judges chose two books that recounted two individual struggles with deathly illness from Aids.

In our details, Adam and I are so very different from so many people in Africa with Aids - we are white, relatively affluent, and gay. But the human essentials of our stories echo the isolation, the despair, the fear and the bodily failure that many millions of Africans currently face.

But most crucially, our books carry a strong message of hope. For they detail a central fact: that we have survived Aids. We have recovered from terrible illness and are living. We are productive, sometimes joyful, members of this society.

For the most important fact about Aids is good news - the hope-filled fact that Aids is no longer a necessarily fatal condition. Medications exist that, if properly administered, make Aids a long-term chronic condition. Those medications can work effectively in resource-poor settings, and every South African has a right not to die from Aids.

So the judges' choice urges all of us to choose action rather than despair.

They signal that if we act effectively now, we can hugely reduce the illness and suffering and death it is causing. This is what the government's national Aids treatment plan recognises. With the right treatment, Aids is now medically manageable.

There are still too many who equivocate before the elementary scientific and medical facts about Aids. We still lack clear and unambiguous national leadership that affirms the message that Aids is treatable and is medically manageable. For the truth is that we have it within our own power to deal effectively with this epidemic.

This newspaper has taken an unequivocal stand on these issues. And each week the Everyone Knows Someone campaign brings helpful, hopeful, stories into the public's homes. For constructive action holds the key, if we can only bring ourselves to believe in it and in our own capacity to achieve.

060716
ST060709