Nelspruit, Washington | Tuesday
The Washington Post has waded into the debate surrounding the Aids pandemic, highlighting the ANC’s resistance to wide-scale distribution of anti-retrovirals.
In a scathing report, the newspaper quoted an open letter written by Rhoda Kadalie, a former anti-apartheid activist and now executive director of the Impumelelo trust in South Africa.
“People are dying in the thousands. This is not what I fought forI travel abroad to conferences often. Before, we could bask in [Nelson] Mandela’s reflected glory, now I have to explain Mbeki as whites used to have to explain apartheid,” said Kadalie in her letter, which was first published in the Sunday Independent.
‘ANC has not relented in its resistance to the only medicines known to slow the replication of the virus that causes Aids’ The Washington Post continues: “South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, has not relented in its resistance to the only medicines known to slow the replication of the virus that causes Aids, nearly six months after the government defeated major pharmaceutical firms in a celebrated court case presumed to strengthen poor nations’ authority to make cheap, generic versions of patented Aids medicines.
“With an estimated 4,7-million people infected with HIV, more than in any other country, South Africa continues to approach antiretroviral therapies with an ambivalence that first surfaced publicly nearly two years ago when President Thabo Mbeki began questioning, in speeches and letters, the drugs’ efficacy and the causal link between HIV and Aids,” it said in its edition on Monday.
Mbeki has repeatedly emphasised the role of poverty in the spread of HIV, and last year assembled a research panel of international experts including “dissident” scientists who contend that Aids is not caused by a virus, but a host of other factors including immune systems weakened by substandard living conditions that are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, the paper said.
“But part of the ANC’s reservations are rooted in its deep racial suspicions that were fostered by five decades of brutally racist apartheid rule, when blacks were subjected to chemical weapons and black women were the targets of sterilisation campaigns.”
Meanwhile, only a third of South African companies report to the public about their employment policy, and incidence of fraud and HIV/Aids, a KPMG study said on Monday.
The forensic auditing company’s associate director Wayne Visser said South African companies lagged substantially behind their international counterparts in the production of stand-alone reports.
Visser expressed concern on the lack of reporting of employment equity policy, fraud and HIV/Aids.
“Given the fact that Johannesburg will be hosting the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it is worrying that only a quarter mention this issue,” said Visser. – Sapa, Matthew Burbidge
Political Resistance in S. Africa Blocks Wide Use of HIV Drugs – The Washinston Post
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