The glaring absence of President Thabo Mbeki from the first South African Aids Conference, and the health minister’s ongoing sidelining of science in favour of politics, took much of the gloss off the conference’s undoubted achievements.
The pall of divisive politics hung over the conference. This was a recurring preoccupation in corridor talk at the conference. At the same time participants were united in expressing a sense of triumph that the provision of anti-retroviral treatment is now part of the government’s HIV/Aids agenda.
Aids experts, government officials and scientists gathered at the Durban Convention Centre this week for the three-day conference to share experiences and research, and to ”reinvigorate” the country’s efforts in dealing with HIV/Aids.
The conference was an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to build bridges, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, the conference’s scientific programme committee chairperson, told the Mail & Guardian.
But the eruption of politics into science began before the conference kicked off.
Mbeki’s article in his letter on ANC Today on August 1 commented on the decision by the Medicines Control Council decision to review nevirapine: ”We must free ourselves of the ‘friends’ who populate our ranks, originating from the world of the rich, who come to us, perhaps dressed in jeans and T-shirts, as advisers and consultants, while we end up as the voice that gives popular legitimacy to decisions we neither made, nor intended to make, which our ‘friends’ made for us, taking advantage of an admission that perhaps we are not sufficiently educated.”
His words were echoed at the opening of the conference when Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang addressed a capacity crowd. She was allocated two minutes to introduce Deputy President Jacob Zuma, but instead defended the government’s actions in fighting the spread of HIV/Aids.
While she spoke, members of the audience wearing bright yellow T-shirts, bearing the slogan ”2 pills can save a life”, held up posters with the names of people who have died from Aids. This was the first visible protest by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) with MÃ