Global AIDS conference returns to transformed South Africa

At the epicentre of the worldwide AIDS pandemic, South Africa now boasts the largest treatment programme in the world, with 3.4 million people receiving the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that allow those living with HIV to lead normal lives. The contrast with the Mbeki era, when the health minister touted beetroot and the African potato as AIDS remedies and hundreds of delegates walked out of the conference when the president suggested poverty might be the leading cause of AIDS, couldn’t be sharper. 

During his presidency, Mbeki embraced a fringe movement of HIV deniers and resisted international and domestic pressure to seriously address the AIDS crisis. He denounced ARVs as Western inventions with poisonous side effects. “The patients were dying like flies. We were treating them with tender loving care and vitamins. We had nothing,” said Dr Jean Bassett, who founded the HIV treatment centre at the Witkoppen Clinic in Johannesburg in 1996. 

Many South Africans living with HIV were not so lucky. A 2008 Harvard University study estimated that Mbeki’s obstruction resulted in at least 330,000 unnecessary deaths in the first half of the decade. Major change did not come until new leadership was in place. Mbeki was ousted in 2008, and the following year Aaron Motsoaledi, a respected doctor, was appointed health minister by new South African president Jacob Zuma. 

Motsoaledi immediately refocused the government response to the pandemic, launching a nationwide testing campaign and expanding ARV treatment. 

Today 7 million South Africans, 19 per cent of the adult population, live with HIV. The epidemic robbed many families of breadwinners, created an army of orphans and struck down millions. While great progress in providing treatment was made, the social and economic costs of the delayed response are still being felt.