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Hundreds walk out on Mbeki at AIDS conference
DURBAN, South Africa (CNN) -- South African President Thabo Mbeki says poverty is to blame for the quick spread of AIDS and denies that his country has responded too slowly to combat the disease. "There is no substance to the allegations that there is any hesitation on the part of our government to confront the challenge of HIV-AIDS," Mbeki said at the opening ceremonies in Durban of the 13th World AIDS Conference.
Hundreds of delegates walked out as Mbeki spoke Sunday. The South Africa president has been heavily criticized in recent months for consulting with AIDS dissidents who argue that HIV does not cause the disease, a position strongly disputed by nearly all scientists and health officials. He has also been criticized for arguing that a program to treat pregnant women with the anti-AIDS drug AZT could do more harm than good. Latest figures suggest that 50 percent of all 15-year-olds in South Africa will die of AIDS.
"Some in our common world consider the questions that I and the rest of our government have raised around the HIV/AIDS issue as akin to grave criminal and genocidal conduct," Mbeki said at the conference. "What I hear said repeatedly, stridently, is, 'Don't ask questions.'" During his address, Mbeki linked HIV to AIDS but suggested it was not the lone cause of the syndrome. "The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe, including South Africa, is poverty," he said. The controversy over Mbeki's stance on AIDS has raged for months and prompted 5,000 doctors, scientists and other AIDS professionals to take the extraordinary step of releasing, just days before the conference, a declaration that calls the link between HIV and AIDS "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous." Widely seem as a rebuke to Mbeki, the "Durban declaration" demanded that public health professionals focus immediately on stopping the spread of the disease. Lost generationSeventy percent of the 34 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than two million people died of AIDS last year. It is estimated that one in four sub-Saharan Africans will die of AIDS, now the region's leading cause of death. More than two million people in the region died in 1999 alone. Experts say that AIDS is wiping out an entire generation that is a major portion of the national work force, including doctors, teachers and engineers. Parental deaths leave behind orphans who cannot afford to go to school or who cannot find someone to educate them. "There will be, for the first time, more people in their 60s and 70s than people in their 30s and 40s," said Dr. Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS program. "What we're seeing is a tremendous loss of people in the middle age groups from 20 to 40, and so the structure of the population is changing very dramatically," said Alan Whiteside, head of the Health, Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of Natal in Durban.
Piot, who spoke at the ceremonies after Mbeki, appealed to developed countries to forgive African debt so impoverished countries can concentrate more of their resources on fighting the disease. "Today we need billions -- not millions -- to fight AIDS. We need, at a minimum, $3 billion per year for Africa alone for basic prevention and basic care. And this figure is ten times what is being spent today," he said. Lower drug prices demandedOn Saturday the World Bank helped inch Africa toward that goal when it proposed designating $500 million to help African nations fight AIDS. "It's a good start what the World Bank is doing," Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the U.S. National Institutes Of Health, told CNN.
"And I think if you have money that starts off like that, then you'll have developed countries putting in a substantial amount of resources," said Fauci. Fauci said South Africa was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. "We have a situation here in South Africa where 20 percent of the adult population is infected, and it's projected that one half of the 15-year-olds in this nation will ultimately die of HIV-AIDS, so you've got to prevent future infection among adults, and you've got to prevent infection from a mother to a child," he said. Earlier Sunday, marching activists called on the world's drug companies to lower prices for AIDS treatments and they asked Mbeki to reconsider his analysis of the disease. CNN Medical Correspondent Eileen O'Connor, CNN Johannesburg Bureau Chief Charlayne Hunter-Gault and The Associated Press contributed to this report. RELATEDS AT  :
Attacking AIDS with a 'Cocktail' TherapyRELATED STORIES: Protesters target drug firms as AIDS conference opens in South Africa RELATED SITES: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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CNN's Kyra Phillips interviews Sandra Thurman of the U.S. Office of National AIDS Policy about the devastation of AIDS in Africa (July 8)
