A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.
The Harvard study concluded that the policies grew out of President Thabo Mbeki?s denial of the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.
Coming in the wake of Mr. Mbeki?s ouster in September after a power struggle in his party, the African National Congress, the report has reignited questions about why Mr. Mbeki, a man of great acumen, was so influenced by AIDS denialists.
And it has again caused soul-searching about why his colleagues in the party did not act earlier to challenge his resistance to broadly accepted methods of treating and preventing AIDS.
Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mr. Mbeki?s?s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies.
He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa ? the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world?s AIDS pandemic ? back into the mainstream.
?I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying,? Ms. Hogan, an A.N.C. stalwart who was imprisoned for a decade during the anti-apartheid struggle, said in a recent interview. ?The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.?
For years, the South African government did not provide antiretroviral medicines, even as Botswana and Namibia, neighboring countries with epidemics of similar scale, took action, the Harvard study reported.
The Harvard researchers quantified the human cost of that inaction by comparing the number of people who got antiretrovirals in South Africa from 2000 to 2005 with the number the government could have reached had it put in place a workable treatment and prevention program.
They estimated that by 2005, South Africa could have been helping half those in need but had reached only 23 percent. By comparison, Botswana was already providing treatment to 85 percent of those in need, and Namibia to 71 percent.
The 330,000 South Africans who died for lack of treatment and the 35,000 babies who perished because they were infected with H.I.V. together lost at least 3.8 million years of life, the study concluded.
Epidemiologists and biostatisticians who reviewed the study for The New York Times said the researchers had based their estimates on conservative assumptions and used a sound methodology.
?They have truly used conservative estimates for their calculations, and I would consider their numbers quite reasonable,? James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley?s School of Public Health, said in an e-mail message.
The report was posted online last month and will be published on Monday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.
Max Essex, the virologist who has led the Harvard School of Public Health?s AIDS research program for the past 20 years and who oversaw the study, called South Africa?s response to AIDS under Mr. Mbeki ?a case of bad, or even evil, public health.?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/world/africa/26aids.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalinkBeetroot and garlic as AIDS remedies?
The power of denial I spose, the final paragraph sums it up....
For South Africans who watched the dying and were powerless to stop it, the grief is still raw. Zackie Achmat, the country?s most prominent advocate for people with AIDS, became sick during the almost five years he refused to take antiretrovirals until they were made widely available. He cast Mr. Mbeki as the leading man in this African tragedy.
?He is like Macbeth,? Mr. Achmat said. ?It?s easier to walk through the blood than to turn back and admit you made a mistake.?
Topic: A Lethal Denial