/ 6 June 2007

Activist says SA must raise wages to fight Aids

South Africa will not be able to halt the spread of HIV/Aids unless it increases wages for government healthcare workers and other public servants, the head of a leading HIV/Aids advocacy group said on Wednesday.

In a presentation at the third South African Aids conference, Siphokazi Mthathi, general secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign, warned that discontent in the public sector threatened to undermine the government’s plan to expand the availability of life-saving Aids drugs and other treatments to hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive people.

An estimated 12% of South Africa’s 47-million people are infected with HIV, and about 1 000 die each day from Aids and related diseases.

”We cannot talk about implementing an ambitious national plan when we do not pay public workers properly,” Mthathi told 4 000 researchers, activists and healthcare workers at the conference in Durban.

Mthathi’s remarks came on the sixth day of a massive strike by public servants in South Africa. Unions representing nearly 1 million doctors, nurses, teachers and other workers walked off the job on Friday after the government refused to meet their demands for an across-the-board 12% wage increase.

The government is offering a 6,5% increase.

A small group of public servants protested outside the Aids conference on Tuesday, shortly before Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and other government officials arrived to officially open the four-day event.

South African officials say government health care workers will play a key role in the new national Aids plan, which was unveiled in March to the delight of activists, scientists and others who had criticised the government for failing to take strong action against the epidemic.

The new strategy, among other things, envisions a five-fold increase in the number of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral drugs by 2011. An estimated 700 000 needy South Africans cannot currently get these medications, sometimes because there is no doctor in their community to prescribe the drugs.

Activists have cited a shortage of doctors, especially in rural areas, as one of the main obstacles to halting HIV/Aids in Southern Africa, the epicentre of the pandemic. – Reuters