The South African president Thabo Mbeki has ordered his Health Ministry to investigate claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV, following months of controversy in South Africa over the government's refusal to fund AZT treatment to prevent mother to baby transmission of HIV.
South African scientists are dismayed by the government's ongoing refusal to come to grips with the AIDS crisis. On a visit to London two weeks ago, Dr Hoosen Coovadia, the chair of the forthcoming Durban World AIDS Conference, told aidsmap: "The government has lurched from stupidity to ignorance to disaster in its handling of AIDS. Not a single expert on AIDS is involved in the government's National AIDS Council".
President Mbeki is believed to have been lobbied by so-called AIDS dissidents, who claim that HIV does not cause AIDS, after public debate in South Africa exploded last year over the question of whether or not the government should fund short-course AZT treatment to prevent mother to baby transmission.
However, year by year testing of pregnant women in cities such as Durban has shown a rapid increase in the proportion of mothers who are HIV-positive. In 1999, 34% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in Durban tested HIV-positive, compared with less than 10% at the beginning of the 1990s. Critics of the HIV-AIDS link have been consistently unable to come up with an explanation for the growth in HIV diagnoses over time when populations or cohorts are sampled.
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