Word: mbeki
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South African president Thabo Mbeki, hosting the 13th International AIDS Conference, is fiddling while his country dies, say a growing number of AIDS scientists and activists. During the five days of the conference alone, 9,000 South Africans will be infected with HIV; 2,600 will see their HIV infection progress to full-blown AIDS; and a further 1,800 South Africans will die of the disease. Yet, in his keynote speech to the conferenceon Sunday, Mbeki again refused, to the consternation of the vast majority of the AIDS-treatment community, to unambiguously stress HIV infection as the cause...
...Mbeki's position has been privately greeted as something of a disaster by Clinton administration officials, who will receive the South African president on a state visit next month. In their official comments they avoided criticism of Mbeki so as not to prompt a further backlash, but the controversy is almost certain to provoke protests from U.S. AIDS activists and cast a cloud over Washington's relationship with its favorite new-generation African leader...
...controversy also threatens to disrupt a major international AIDS conference to be held in South Africa in July, with a growing number of key experts threatening to stay away if Mbeki's government insists on indulging the views of dissident academics whose views were debated and discounted a decade ago in the U.S. To the consternation of South Africa's own medical and AIDS-activist community, Mbeki has invited Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg and his colleague David Resnick - who maintain that the HIV virus is harmless and not the cause of AIDS - to serve on a panel advising...
...South African government maintains the drugs are too expensive and potentially harmful. As the protests escalated, Mbeki and his aides have invoked Duesberg's theories and his claim that AZT does more harm than good, and have accused their critics of promoting profiteering pharmaceutical corporations. And the president has rationalized his stance by invoking Duesberg. While proclaiming himself undecided on Duesberg's arguments, Mbeki insists that they ought to be debated and instructed his AIDS advisory panel to consider questions ranging from the merits of treatments such as AZT to "whether there's this thing called AIDS, what...
...Mbeki's position reportedly derived from reading Duesberg's ideas while trawling the Internet for information on HIV. And as a proud intellectual and instinctive contrarian, he won't easily be cowed by the howls of protest. In the end, though, Mbeki's flirtation with weird science may prove to be an embarrassment to a government that hopes to lead a continent-wide African renaissance. But that embarrassment will be nothing compared with the human suffering that could result from challenging the fundamentals of AIDS science in a country with one of the world's highest incidences...