Aids meeting opens in South Africa

Activists jeered South Africa's health minister yesterday as a national Aids conference got under way amid mounting anger at a tepid government response to the disease, which activists say kills 600 South Africans a day.

Protesters holding up signs reading "Save Our Youth, Save Our Future, Treat AIDS Now" heckled Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as she opened the conference attended by some 2,500 delegates in the port city of Durban.

"Shame on you" rang out in the auditorium as the minister - blamed by Aids activists for delaying the introduction of life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs - said South Africa would set its Aids policies "without influence from foreign agendas".

"Some say that providing anti-retrovirals is as simple as administering aspirin. Far from the truth," Ms Tshabalala-Msimang said to boos from the audience.

"The provision of anti-retroviral drugs in the public health sector is a subject which must be considered soberly, and the government is doing so."

The four-day Durban conference is the first national Aids meeting in South Africa, which has the single highest Aids caseload in the world with some 4.7 million people infected.

Economists say the epidemic is a significant threat to the future of the nation, Africa's economic powerhouse, with average life expectancy estimated at just 45 years by 2005.

Critics say South Africa has moved too slowly on HIV/Aids and the government's refusal to permit public sector hospitals to use anti-retroviral drugs, the only medicines proven effective against Aids, has stoked anger.

President Thabo Mbeki's government has questioned the drugs as expensive, potentially dangerous and difficult to take, arguing that priority must go to fighting the widespread black poverty that remains nine years after the end of white rule.

Mr Mbeki did not attend yesterday's meeting. But Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who heads the National Aids Council, repeated that new drug treatments would be introduced - albeit only when the country was ready for them.

"We need to ensure that the necessary infrastructures are in place," Mr Zuma said. Peter Piot, head of the United Nations Aids body UNAIDS, hinted that South Africa was dangerously out of step with the rest of the world when it came to Aids treatment policy.

"Throughout the world the debate is not whether to offer anti-retroviral treatment, but how to do it," Mr Piot said in a video address to the meeting. "For heaven's sake, let's not wait until we have the perfect solution."

South Africa's vociferous Aids activist organisations have vowed to keep pressure on the government.

The Treatment Action Campaign, the nation's biggest activist group, this week backed civil disobedience as a way to force the government's hand, while protesters marched through Durban yesterday to make their voices heard.

"If they want proof it works, I am proof. I am alive," said 26-year-old Zinhle Thabetha, one of about 100 HIV-positive people getting anti-retroviral treatment through a local non-governmental organisation.