Word: mbeki
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...terrible as these numbers are, they're bound to get worse. While some of the talk in Durban focused on modest advances in AIDS treatment--and on South African President Thabo Mbeki's flirtation with discredited ideas about what causes AIDS--the central dilemma of the conference was how to fight this voracious plague under the conditions that made the continent so vulnerable in the first place...
...Thabo Mbeki has one of the hardest jobs in world politics: following Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. He has to make good on the promise of liberation, even as many of the country's postapartheid hopes are collapsing amid low economic growth, soaring unemployment and a crime wave that is tearing at the social order. As the leader of Africa's economic and military powerhouse, Mbeki is also expected to play regional statesman and peacemaker, and to lead an aggressive campaign against the AIDS epidemic ravaging the continent...
...this fight that he has most disappointed his backers. Mbeki has resolutely proved to be his own man, most notably by endorsing the views of scientists who believe that HIV and AIDS may not be related. That kind of thinking generally gets researchers laughed off as flat-earthers, but the stakes are much higher for Mbeki, who is the leader of a country engaged in a fierce campaign against one of the world's fastest rates of infection. Never mind that the Clinton Administration once championed him as one of the key architects of an African renaissance. "South Africa," enthused...
Hence Washington's consternation when Mbeki's forceful, bold voice began speaking out often against the scientific assumptions of current AIDS therapies, refused to supply AZT to pregnant women to prevent transmission of HIV in the womb and then invited "AIDS dissident" scientists to sit on a prestigious national advisory panel. Disquiet deepened last week when Mbeki, opening the international AIDS conference, maintained that "we [can] not blame everything on a single virus" and stressed poverty as the most important factor. Almost everyone--including some of his most loyal political allies--has been stunned by Mbeki's HIV skepticism...
...Mbeki is believed to have encountered "dissident" thinking last year during a late-night Web-browsing session, and it's hardly surprising that he may have been searching for an intellectual escape route from the implications of his country's nightmare. Over the next decade, AIDS is expected to devour up to 20% of South Africa's national wealth. Half its population of 15-year-olds is expected to die of the disease. Far from a renaissance, sub-Saharan Africa is in the throes of a plague of medieval proportions. Even at 80% discounts, treatment therapies are simply beyond...