AFP, Port Elizabeth | Saturday
RACIAL biases and divisions within South Africa’s research community are hampering the country’s battle against Aids, say speakers at a conference examining the demographic impact of the disease.
“The research community is predominantly white, the government is predominantly black,” University of Stellenbosch professor Simon Bekker told delegates. “This may cause problems of communication.”
Bekker said research on HIV/Aids by white academics frequently did not contribute to government efforts to address the demographic, social and health problems it was facing as a result of the crisis.
“The research is often irrelevant,” Bekker said.
Another speaker, Bukelwa Mbulawa-Hans, a member of parliament for the African National Congress (ANC), said racial bias by some researchers was affecting the veracity of their findings.
“There are racial divisions within the research community,” said Mbulawa-Hans, a doctor. “We have to say it.”
She cited a controversial paper delivered at the conference by the head of the Population Research Unit at Rhodes University, Rob Shell, who argued that poverty could not be equated with the spread of the HI virus in South Africa.
Shell had based his findings on research carried out in the Port Elizabeth region, one of the slightly more affluent areas of Eastern Cape, the country’s poorest province, Mbulwa-Hans said.
“Had Professor Shell been a black man, he would have known that there are other areas more poverty-stricken than Port Elizabeth,” she said.
Shell claimed that, based on his research, several communities mired in poverty in Eastern Cape showed a low incidence of Aids, but that the prevalence increased in wealthier communities, especially where migrant workers frequented sex workers.
South African President Thabo Mbeki has controversially questioned the causal link between HIV and Aids and said that ills such as poverty and malnutrition contribute to the disease.
His stance has created a furore in the country and been condemned by health workers, who claim it has prompted members of high-risk communities to ignore educational programmes aimed at reducing the high prelavence of HIV in the country, where some 4.2 million people were infected by the end of 1999, according to government figures.
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