March 18, by Aernout Zevenbergen. After years of legal court cases, demonstrations and international laughter and contempt, South Africa has presented a new policy on tackling aids. Aids organisations, the federation of trade unions Cosatu and UN Aids are but a few of the actors who enthusiastically embrace the new approach.

South Africa wants to halve the rate of new HIV infections by 2011 – these now stand at 1500 a day. "It aims to provide treatment, care and support services to 80 percent of HIV-positive people and their families by 2011", writes the newspaper Daily News.

Deputy-president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has called on the private sector to support the new policy, not just with words and actions – but financially. She asked Patrice Motsepe (president of the Business Unity South Africa) directly: "Patrice, match us rand for rand, man."

The latest changes finalise a slow but radical 180 degree change from South Africa"s approach at the end of the 20th century. President Thabo Mbeki and his minister for Health, Manto Tshabala-Msimang, amazed the world for years with their extremely cautious approach to aids. Mbeki invited dissident scientists who doubted the existence of HIV, and instead focused on issues like poverty as causes for the many diseases that trouble HIV-positive individuals.

Tshabalala-Msimang for years, until very recently, focused more on healthy diets than on anything else to cure and care for patients. Cosatu-leader Zwelinzima Vavi dismissed her public lectures by labelling them the 'spinach speeches".
South Africa"s approach led to criticism first, followed by ridicule. Mbeki and 'Manto" were able to ignore the criticism. The ridicule, however, was too much.

Especially during the last international aids conference in August 2006 in Toronto one expert after the other pointed at the mockery South Africa was making of its own approach to aids. It all started with an exhibition in Toronto of the SA Department of Health of healthy food ingredients, with no medication in sight. The harshest criticism however came from Stephen Lewis, head of UN Aids. He referred to South Africa"s approach as coming from a "lunatic fringe".

Within weeks Mbeki re-arranged his aids policy. His deputy-president Mlambo-Ngcuka became responsible for setting up a new national coherent and effective war on HIV. 'Manto" got a new deputy herself, whose sole task would be to fight aids.
The result was presented recently, it was hailed and labelled "a model for the rest of Africa".

But...
There is a serious 'but".
One of the focal points in the new approach is prevention by educating the young. Within that focal point the attention is shifted to informing women, because they are three times as easily infected by the aids-virus as men.

And that is the 'but".
Who infects them?
Precisely: men.
Why not aim for the root?
This is what Dr. Kgosi Letlape (chairperson of the SA Medical Association) said, on Wednesday March 14. According to one newspaper, he hit out at the sexual behaviour of men saying HIV and Aids was a disease of men, spread by men.
'The fight against aids could not be won unless the issue of men as "vectors" of the disease was addressed, otherwise everyone was just "pussyfooting" around the issue."

Exactly.
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