The crazy things they say: politicians and HIV

Via PlusNews.

Political commitment is key to the success of HIV programmes and African leaders have been at the forefront of the fight against HIV on the continent, but politicians also have the power to harm HIV/AIDS campaigns.

Uganda's recently appointed health minister, Christine Ondoa, has been berated by AIDS activists for comments she allegedly made in an interview with a local newspaper on 1 August. According to The Observer, Ondoa claimed to know three people who had been cured of HIV through prayer.

"I am sure and I have evidence that someone who was [HIV] positive turned negative after prayers," she said.

Activists described her comments as "careless and misleading". Ondoa joins a long list of African leaders who have been criticized for comments deemed detrimental to the fight against HIV; here are some of the more controversial statements made by politicians:

Thabo Mbeki - In 1999, the then South African president said the ARV zidovudine - also known as AZT - had toxic side-effects and was dangerous to health, and as such, the government would not provide it free of charge to HIV-positive pregnant women.

Mbeki stirred controversy when he questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS; in 2000 he set up a Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel, largely comprising AIDS denialists, to discuss how South Africa should deal with the crisis.

Mbeki also evoked conspiracy theories by alleging that the US Central Intelligence Agency, working with large pharmaceutical companies, was part of a conspiracy to promote the view that HIV caused AIDS.

In 2001, the NGO Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) filed a lawsuit against the government aimed at giving HIV-positive pregnant women access to the ARV, nevirapine, used to reduce the risk of HIV transmission from mother to child. TAC won the case, and the government was forced to provide the drug through the public health system.

According to the authors of a 2008 Harvard study, more than 330,000 lives were lost as a result of the delays in implementing a feasible and timely ARV treatment programme in South Africa.

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang - South Africa's health minister from 1999 to 2008 under Mbeki, her years in office were characterized by controversy, largely due to her reluctance to develop public sector policies involving the use of ARVs to fight AIDS.

Even after ARVs became available, Tshabalala-Msimang continued to cast doubt on their safety and efficacy, actively endorsing alternative therapists who promoted scientifically untested alternatives to ARVs.

Read the rest here.

[If an item is not written by an IRMA member, it should not be construed that IRMA has taken a position on the article's content, whether in support or in opposition.]

AIDS denial: A lethal delusion

The effects of AIDS denialism in Africa are no joke, however. In 2000, as the movement was rapidly losing all credibility, South African president Thabo Mbeki asked some of the leading denialists to sit on an advisory council to guide his response to the epidemic. On their advice he did everything in his power to resist ART use in his country.

via New Scientist, by Jonny Steinberg

ON 27 December 2008, a well-heeled 52-year-old woman died in a Los Angeles hospital. Her death certificate describes a body riddled with opportunistic infections typical of the late stages of AIDS. Christine Maggiore had tested HIV positive 16 years earlier, but she had shunned ART, the antiretroviral therapy that stops HIV replicating and prevents AIDS.

This was not the first time a death in Maggiore's family had made headlines: five years earlier her 3-year-old daughter Eliza Jane had died. The autopsy described a chronically ill little girl who was underweight, under-height, and had encephalitis and pneumonia - all AIDS-related. When pregnant, Maggiore had again rejected ART and she had breastfed Eliza Jane, another way of transmitting the virus.

Why, in 21st-century California, would a middle-class woman and her young daughter die like this when there is tried-and-tested treatment for their illness? The answer lies in a bizarre medical conspiracy theory that says AIDS is not caused by HIV infection (see Five myths about HIV and AIDS).

It is tempting to dismiss the so-called AIDS denialism movement out of hand, but it has a strong internet presence, with a plethora of websites and blogs that can mislead the unwary. While the movement has lately suffered some significant blows to its credibility, it has in the recent past wielded extraordinary influence, especially in southern Africa, the centre of the world's AIDS epidemic. "Denialism has been relegated to the fringes of the internet, but it isn't of no consequence," says John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, Ithaca, New York, and one of the world's foremost AIDS researchers. "It can still cost the lives of unsuspecting people."

Read the rest.