Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Washington Blade - November 4, 2005
Katherine Volin
Part memoir and part social commentary, Cameron's book details how he has battled AIDS, how the South African government and pharmaceutical companies have approached the disease and how his work as a judge inevitably intertwined with the global pandemic.
Cameron, 52, was diagnosed as HIV positive in December of 1986 and finally decided to come out publicly in 1999, after a South African woman declared her HIV-positive status and paid the ultimate price.
"She came out with her status on a Zulu-language radio station on the first of December 1998, and was killed three weeks later - just before Christmas," Cameron says. The woman, Gugu Dlamini, was stoned and stabbed to death by her neighbors.
"It just struck me as so terribly poignant that this unemployed, very poor woman living undefended in a township with no job, no income, no protections, so different from me in almost any way, had taken the risk and paid a terrible penalty for it," he says.
An estimated 6 million of South Africa's 44 million citizens are infected with HIV. Within the adult population, the HIV rate is 21 percent. According to the CIA World Factbook.
Motivated by what he felt was his responsibility as a former human rights lawyer and then judge who dealt frequently with HIV-related cases, Cameron publicly declared that he had AIDS in 1999. His hopes for other public officials to announce their status were dashed when Thabo Mbeki, who had just succeeded Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, refused to acknowledge that HIV is the only cause of AIDS.
In 1999 and 2000, Mbeki's response to South Africa's AIDS crisis was to suggest that poverty played a bigger role in the AIDS epidemic than HIV does - a belief he promoted in speeches at an AIDS conference and in front of the South African Parliament, as well as in a letter to then-U.S. president Bill Clinton. Mbeki has not changed his position.
CAMERON SAYS THAT the silence surrounding AIDS and his own country's stifled response to the disease are part of what motivated him to write "Witness to AIDS." The drug regimen prescribed to Cameron not only provided physical relief from AIDS complications, but also psychological respite.
"I don't feel defiled or contaminated or polluted, all those terrible things that we people with HIV actually inside ourselves all too often still feel," Cameron says. "Getting well on the medication changed that so profoundly for me, and that's what gave me the strength to speak out."
Cameron decided that he must work to make anti-retroviral drugs more readily available. At $600 per month, paying for drugs consumed one-third of Cameron's disposable income when he began taking them following his 1997 AIDS diagnosis.
"The drugs I started taking in 1997 were inconceivably expensive, unimaginably expensive," Cameron says. "But very soon, within two years, they came down a huge amount in price. They've continued to come down - they're still coming down."
The sinking cost of anti-retroviral drugs in South Africa is due to the work of activists, Cameron says.
"The activists have shamed the drug corporations into lowering their prices," Cameron says, also noting that the activists have shamed the South African government into working to make drugs more affordable.
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