Nelson Mandela on Thursday said doctors have given him a clean bill of health after his bout with prostate cancer a few years ago.
Mandela (83) on a two-day private visit to Malawi, said his doctors ”have now cleared me” and the ”prostrate cancer is gone.”
Speaking at a regional meeting of Rotarians in the southern resort district of Mangochi, Mandela said his South African doctors told him that he was going to recover because the disease was detected in its early stages.
He said apart from the cancer, he contracted tuberclosis while in jail at Robben Island where he spent 27 years, but survived because the disease was also found early on.
Painting a gloomy picture of the HIV/Aids scourge which has ravaged southern Africa, Mandela called for a positive attitude towards the terminally ill.
”If human beings are not treated like human beings, they lose the will to fight back,” said.
He criticised the stigma and taboos attached to HIV/Aids, saying they alone has ”killed more people than the disease itself.”
He said Aids was claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famine and floods in Africa.
”Aids is clearly a disaster effectively wiping out development gains of the past decade and sabotaging the future.”
Mandela leaves Malawi on Thursday after his two-day private visit – AFP
