President Thabo Mbeki should take over leadership of South Africa’s National Aids Council (Sanac) in the face of soaring HIV/Aids mortality figures, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) chairperson Zackie Achmat said on Wednesday.
He was commenting at the end of a three-day workshop attended by health activists from 22 African countries on a 2003/04 mortality report released by Statistics South Africa three weeks ago.
He said the report showed a dramatic change in the pattern of deaths.
”For the first time ever, in 2003, people aged 30 to 34 were dying in larger numbers than people in their 60s,” he said.
More serious is that the number of infant deaths — in the nought to four-year age group — had increased from less than 35 000 in 1997 to over 55 000 in 2004.
There has also been a ”very dramatic” increase in deaths among women. Male deaths had increased by 60% from 1997 to 2003, and female deaths by 93%.
”There’s only one thing that explains this: HIV/Aids. And for all of us, we want to appeal to the government: this is an emergency. This inflation in the death rate requires everyone’s support to deal with it,” Achmat said.
”The most important thing that could be done is that the president could lead Sanac, bring people together, not on a quarterly basis, but on a monthly basis, to get updates and reports, to select what is to be done, where we need to take emergency steps to bring people on treatment for HIV/Aids, where we have to improve the management of TB and so on.
”It’s under the president’s term of office that these deaths are occurring, so the person responsible for dealing with it has to be the president.”
The current head of the council is Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who took over the post from Jacob Zuma before his controversial views on showering and Aids became public knowledge.
Achmat said the heads of state of Botswana, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi all headed their own countries’ Aids councils.
He also said TB was the biggest killer of HIV-positive people in South Africa, but the diagnostic tools used to detect the disease were 107 years old.
This means that while the results of an HIV/Aids test could be available in 15 minutes, people in poor areas could wait up to three months for a TB result.
In 1997, South Africa recorded 22 000 deaths from TB; by 2003 this had gone up to 67 000.
”That is a phenomenal increase by anyone’s standards,” he said.
An HIV-positive person with TB was 29 times more likely to die from the disease than someone who had TB but was HIV negative.
TAC general secretary Sipho Mthathi said the parts of the national TB crisis plan, launched by Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang last month, that the TAC had seen deliberately understated the role of HIV/Aids in what was a ”dual epidemic”.
She said a reason for the high TB death rate in HIV-positive people was that the disease often manifested in ”non-traditional” places in their bodies.
”The usual TB we know is pulmonary TB. Many people living with HIV get TB in other places, and that means often TB is diagnosed too late in people living with HIV, and therefore treatment starts late.
”The national TB crisis plan needed to be located in the understanding that you’ve got 70% of the population who get TB, being people living with HIV, and you therefore need to think HIV when you see TB, and you need to think TB when you see HIV … People with lower immunity are ten times more likely to get TB.” — Sapa