South Africa’s Aids pandemic had become a world disgrace as serious as apartheid, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Njongonkulu Ndungane said on Tuesday.
”The fact that 600 people are dying daily is a serious indictment on our elected government and leaves the impression that it doesn’t care whether we live or die,” he told journalists in Cape Town.
He was commenting on the Medicines Control Council’s recent threat to withdraw registration of the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine for use in the prevention of mother-to-child-transmission of HIV.
”How can our government not acknowledge that nevirapine is recommended in dozens of countries in the world, including our own, as a safe chronic medication?” he asked.
He said that when Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang continued to question the efficacy of ARV’s and talked ”blithely” about waiting for the right structures to be in place she, and those who supported her, were equating the Aids virus with manageable diseases.
Ndungane wished her department could act on HIV/Aids with the same admirable sense of urgency that had been applied to a meningitis scare in Gauteng.
”The minister is quite right when she says the Aids pandemic is the responsibility of every government department and I believe it is time her fellow ministers accepted responsibility for what has become a world disgrace as serious as apartheid.” – Sapa