Visiting US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist suggested on Thursday South Africa had to take the scope of the Aids pandemic sweeping the country more seriously.
Frist said in conversations with South Africa’s trade minister he was told Aids was not hurting the country’s economy or lowering life expectancy despite assessments by the World Bank and others.
An estimated 4,7-million people, roughly one in nine people, are infected with HIV. An estimated 600 to a 1 000 South Africans die everyday from Aids-related complications.
”I want to encourage the political leadership here to recognise the magnitude of the problem,” Frist told journalists.
That so many of those dying are in their prime working years is expected to severely impact on the economy, according to a July World Bank study on Aids’ impact in South Africa.
Frist said Trade Minister Alec Erwin told the delegation this was not the case.
”I told him I find that hard to believe based on world literature,” said Frist, who is leading a group of senators touring South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique to learn more about the disease devastating sub-Saharan African.
Frist, a Republican from Tennessee and the other six senators on the delegation, will be instrumental in deciding how the $15-billion, pledged by US President George Bush to combat Aids in Africa, will be paid out.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 30-million of the world’s 42-million Aids sufferers.
”If the United States government is going to be investing tax payer money,” Frist said, ”We need to make sure that money is invested with the full cooperation and support of governments who will be recipients.
The South African government, under pressure to take stronger action against the disease, instructed the health ministry earlier this month to develop a plan for distributing Aids drugs — a move Frist applauded.
In the past, the government had refused to provide Aids medicine to its people through the public health system, making it the target of intense criticism at home and abroad.
The senators’ first stop on Thursday was Soweto’s Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital. There they heard about the overwhelmed urban hospital, struggling to cope with an ever increasing number of Aids patients.
Doctors spoke of the frustration of not being able to properly treat most patients because Aids drugs were still not available at prices their mostly impoverished patients could afford.
The handful who are treated with Aids drugs are part of clinical trial tests.
An unemployed HIV-positive woman broke into sobs as she told her story to the senate delegation.
”I can’t afford medicine, it’s too expensive. I know with your help my dream can come true,” said the 34-year-old woman who would only give her name as Busi.
Like so many others, she is wary of going public with her status because of the intense stigma associated with having the disease here.
Busi said she is often sick, but is only given basic antibiotics to keep opportunistic infections at bay.
At a nearby Aids orphanage funded partly by American money, the senators sat on tiny red plastic chairs and played games of cards with the children.
They sang along with the children as they belted out nursery rhymes and songs, noting those same children could die without proper treatment.
”It’s a human tragedy. That is why we have to do everything we can to get drugs to these kids,” said Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican from Ohio.
The others senators on the delegation were John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee; Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee; and Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming.
At a hospital run by the gold mining giant AngloGold the senators met with miners receiving free Aids drugs from the company.
AngloGold has estimated that between 25 and 30% of its South African work force was HIV positive and decided last year to provide free Aids drugs to its workers.
”Treatment … will change the way this epidemic unfolds,” said Brian Brink, Senior Vice President for AngloGold’s medical division. – Sapa-AP