President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa is dangerously wrong in listening to the so-called AIDS dissidents who dispute the scientifically established facts on the subject of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV). He must not allow the dissidents' opinions to alter his own country's current programme to fight AIDS, which broadly recognises the realities of this dreadful condition. But he was quite right to emphasise, at this year's AIDS conference in Durban, the significance of poverty as a factor in the AIDS pandemic which has been called Africa's apocalypse. Poverty does not cause AIDS, but AIDS assuredly causes poverty and poverty is largely why African countries have been unable to deal satisfactorily with the problem which is now virtually out of control on their continent.
The statistics on AIDS are now so appalling that they are almost impossible to comprehend. They are estimates based on projections from scientifically verified surveys of population samples, and they are far worse now than the projections that were presented to the last International AIDS Conference just two years ago. Some 15,000 people in the world are now contracting HIV every day, to add to the total of 34.3 million already estimated to be HIV positive, and two-thirds of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the children are orphans whose dead mothers passed on HIV to them to blight their short lives.
There is a relatively new drug, Nevirapine, which has been shown to reduce greatly the transmission of HIV from mother to child during pregnancy. But this drug is not available in the public-health services in African countries, any more than the other drugs which have been used in developed countries to treat many of the most distressing symptoms of AIDS and to prolong lives of high quality. The African health services, even those in South Africa, say they simply cannot afford to buy these crucial drugs which are the patented property of vastly wealthy multinational pharmaceutical companies. Yet pharmacists in India, Thailand and Brazil have demonstrated that the same substances can be produced at a cost that could be affordable for countries in the developing world. It will still be some years before a potential vaccine, currently on trial in the United States and Asia, proves sufficiently safe and efficacious to be distributed to whole populations. In the meantime, the African apocalypse could spread worldwide.
Seven months ago, the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, acknowledged that the international community's response to AIDS had failed Africa and that the scale of the crisis required a co-ordinated strategy between governments, intergovernmental bodies, community groups, science and private corporations. That, as one of the most impressive speakers at the Durban conference - Mr Justice Edwin Cameron of the South African High Court, himself HIV positive - said, was more than 200 days ago: "days on each of which, in my country alone, approximately 1,700 people have become newly infected with HIV".
The matter is urgent. More than a quarter of the next generation of Africans will not reach adulthood at the present rate of the spread of HIV. The social fabric of many African states is already tearing apart. If global compassion cannot persuade the world to help out effectively in Africa now, the self-interest of the developed world's governments should at least dictate an immediate provision of essential drug resources and the finance to repair the torn social fabric of the stricken states of Africa. The additional £4.2 million of Irish governmental funds to HIV programmes in developing countries is welcome. But it is the thinnest sliver of what the situation demands.