Folks, it's embarrassing to attribute to Mbeki things that he didn't say - refer to the video clip that NN posted and at least this excerpt of the 'infamous' letter at http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/news/lettermbeki.htm:
We have now also established a
National AIDS Council, again chaired by the Deputy President and bringing together the government and civil society.
An important part of the campaign that we are conducting seeks to
encourage safe sex and the use of condoms.
At the same time, as an essential part of our campaign against HIV-AIDS, we are working to ensure that
we focus properly and urgently on the elimination of poverty among the millions of our people.
Similarly, we are doing everything we can, within our very limited possibilities,
to provide the necessary medicaments and care to deal with what are described as 'opportunistic diseases' that attach to acquired immune deficiency.
As a government and a people, we are trying to organize ourselves
to ensure that we take care of the children affected and orphaned to AIDS.
We work also to ensure that
no section of our society, whether public or private discriminates against people suffering from HIV-AIDS.
In our current budget,
we have included a dedicated fund to finance our activities against HIV-AIDS. This is in addition to funds that the central government departments as well as the provincial and local administrations will spend on this campaign.
We have also contributed to our Medical Research Council such funds as we can,
for the development of an AIDS vaccine.
Demands are being made within the country for
the public health system to provide anti-retroviral drugs for various indications, including mother-to-child transmission.
We are discussing this matter, among others with our statutory licensing authority for medicines and drugs, the
Medicines Control Council (MCC).
Toward the end of last year, speaking in our national parliament, I said that I had asked our Minister of Health to look into various controversies taking place among scientists on HIV-AIDS
and the toxicity of a particular anti-retroviral drug.
In response to this, among other things, the Minister is working to put together an international panel of scientists to discuss all these issues
in as transparent a setting as possible.
As you know, AIDS in the United States and other developed Western countries
has remained largely confined to a section of the male homosexual population.
For example,
the cumulative heterosexual contact, US percentage for AIDS cases among adults/adolescents, through June 1999 is given as 10 percent. (HIV-AIDS Surveillance Report: Midyear edition. Vol 11, No 1, 1999. US Department of Health and Human Services).
The cumulative absolute total for this age group is reported as being
702,748.
US AIDS deaths for the period January 1996 to June 1997 were stated by the US CDC as amounting to
32,750. (Trends in the HIV and AIDS Epidemic: 1998. CDC).
On May 13, 1999, a SAFA-AFP report datelined Paris stated that 1998 UNAIDS and WHO reports had said that
AIDS was responsible for one death in five in Africa, or about two million people.
It quoted a Dr. Awa Coll Seck of UNAIDS as saying that there are
23 million carriers in Africa of HIV.
This SAFA-AFP report quotes Dr. Coll Seck as saying: 'In Southern Africa, the prevalence of the (HIV) infection
has increased so much in five years that this region could, if the epidemic continues to spread at this rate, see its life expectancy decline to 47 by 2005.'
(Interestingly, the five years to which Dr. Coll Seck refers
coincide closely with the period since our liberation from apartheid, white minority rule in 1994).
The report went on to say that almost 1,500 people are infected in South Africa
every day and that, at that point, the equivalent of 3.8 million people in our country carried the virus.
Again as you are aware,
whereas in the West HIV-AIDS is said to be largely homosexually transmitted, it is reported that in Africa, including our country, it is transmitted heterosexually.
Accordingly, as Africans, we have to deal with this
uniquely African catastrophe that:
- contrary to the West, HIV-AIDS in Africa is heterosexually transmitted;
- contrary to the West, where relatively few people have died from AIDS, itself a matter of serious concern, millions are said to have died in Africa; and,
- contrary to the West, where AIDS deaths are declining, even greater numbers of Africans are destined to die.
It is obvious that
whatever lessons we have to and may draw from the West about the grave issue of HIV-AIDS, a simple superimposition of Western experience on African reality would be absurd and illogical.
Such proceeding would constitute
a criminal betrayal of our responsibility to our own people. It was for this reason that I spoke as I did in our parliament, in the manner in which I have indicated.
I am convinced that our urgent task is to respond to the
specific threat that faces us as Africans. We will not eschew this obligation in favour of the
comfort of the recitation of a catechism that
may very well be a correst response to the specific manifestation of AIDS in the West.
We will not, ourselves, condemn our own people to death
by giving up the search for specific and targeted responses to the specifically African incidence of HIV-AIDS.
I make these comments because
our search for these specific and targeted responses is being stridently condemned by some in our country and the rest of the world as constituting a criminal abandonment of the fight against HIV-AIDS.