Geneva | Tuesday
SIX-year old statistics used by President Thabo Mbeki to claim that HIV/Aids is not the leading cause of death in South Africa underestimate the real impact of the disease, the UN agency dealing with the disease said on Tuesday.
UNAids also said deaths from the immune deficiency disease in South Africa had increased massively since 1995.
“Routine reporting of causes of death always has a tendency to underestimate Aids as a cause of death. The reason for this is simply the fact that Aids ‘has many faces’ which often leads to a diagnosis other than Aids, for example tuberculosis, as the cause of death,” UNAids said in a statement.
250 000 people are estimated to have died from Aids in South Africa during 1999, according to the most recent statistics published on the Internet by UNAids. The 1995 figure quoted by Mbeki in a list of causes of death is 2 653.
Mbeki said in a letter to Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a copy of which was published on Monday in South Africa’s Business Day newspaper, that government’s spending on health services should be re-examined in the light of World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics he found on the Internet — dated 1995.
Mbeki in his letter warns the health minister that the figures will “provoke a howl of displeasure and a concerted propaganda campaign from those who have convinced themselves that HIV/Aids is the single biggest cause of death” in South Africa.
The South African leader has been criticised internationally for having said in 2000 that Aids might not be directly caused by HIV, despite the fact that South Africa has the world’s largest HIV population with 4,7-million infected.
Tshabalala-Msimang said in Business Day yesterday that the 1995 statistics that Mbeki used were the latest available.
In August, Mbeki told the BBC: “You know what the largest single cause of death in South Africa is? The largest single cause of death as we sit here is what in the medical statistics is called ‘external causes’ and that is violence in this society”.
United Nations modelling estimates that seven million South Africans will die from Aids-related diseases within the decade.
South Africa has a reputation as one of the most dangerous places outside a war zone but current police statistics point to a total of about 220 000 murders over the next 10 years.
Mbeki has acknowledged that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is a cause of Aids, but does not accept it is the only cause, arguing that poverty plays a key factor in the pandemic that affects more than 25-million Africans. – AFP, Mail & Guardian reporters
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