SPENDING just a small amount of money to pay for HIV drugs would score instant gains in the campaign against South Africa’s Aids crisis, Canadian scientists say. “Although there are barriers to widespread HIV-1 treatment, limited use of anti-retrovirals could have an immediate and substantial impact on South Africa’s Aids epidemic,” say the researchers, from the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/Aids, located in Vancouver. The latest figures on the spread of Aids in South Africa make for alarming reading. An independent study released on May 16 predicted six million South Africans, or 15% of the population, would be infected by the end of the year — and the tally would be more than 25% by 2005 on current trends. The Canadian researchers, writing in Saturday’s issue of the British medical weekly The Lancet, say if a one-off short course of anti-retroviral therapy, costing on average eight dollars a head, were administered to all those who are infected, 110000 HIV-positive births could be prevented by 2005, they say. Life expectancy would be 47.5 years in 2005, compared to 46.6 years in scenarios whereby there is no treatment, they say.