From: April
Judge takes on S.Africa's AIDS 'denialists'

Reuters NewMedia - May 2, 2005
Andrew Quinn

http://www.aegis.org/news/re/2005/RE050502.html

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - White, wealthy and proudly gay, Judge Edwin
Cameron is hardly a typical face of the AIDS pandemic ravaging
southern Africa.

But Cameron, a member of South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal and
the only senior public servant in the country to publicly disclose he
has HIV, shares one thing with millions of other Africans fighting the
virus: a strong desire to live and a deep anger over halting efforts
to fight the disease.

In a new book Cameron dissects Africa's AIDS crisis, a public health
emergency that the United Nations estimates could infect up to 89
million more Africans by 2025.

It is a disaster he blames in part on African "AIDS Denialism," the
prism that some leaders including South African President Thabo Mbeki
have used to downplay or dismiss scientific knowledge on AIDS.

His book, "Witness to AIDS," is an indictment of Western drug firms
which he says kept AIDS medicine out of reach of most Africans for far
too long and the failure of South Africa's leaders to face up to the
debacle.

"We have had leaders referring to AIDS in their families, but never in
themselves," Cameron said in an interview. "We still don't have the
heartfelt, unambiguous, insistent quality of leadership on AIDS that
one would want."

South Africa in 2003 bowed to domestic and international pressure and
launched a public program of anti-retroviral (ARV) drug treatment, a
sign of hope for millions.

But implementation has been slow, thousands are still dying, and AIDS
remains both politicized and stigmatized.

ONE VICTIM AMONG MILLIONS

Cameron's career - not just his HIV status - makes him uniquely
qualified to examine South Africa's response to AIDS, increasingly
depicted as a human rights issue for the estimated 5 million South
Africans infected with the disease.

A human rights lawyer, Rhodes scholar at Britain's Oxford University
and one of Nelson Mandela's first appointments to South Africa's High
Court following the end of apartheid in 1994, Cameron had for almost a
decade been publicly out as a gay man, a rarity in South Africa at the
time.

He was also operating with the private knowledge that in 1986 he was
diagnosed with HIV.

Cameron's personal struggle with HIV reflects the terror that
surrounded the disease before life-prolonging ARV drugs were
introduced in the early 1990s.

"AIDS put a short, sudden and shocking limit on my life," he wrote in
the book, which will be published in Britain, China and the United
States later this year.

"In December 1986 it was for me what for tens of millions of Africans
it still is today - an imminent term of death."

Cameron remains the only prominent South African public official to go
public with his HIV status, despite widespread speculation that other
senior figures including MPs may also be infected.

Mandela, who has become an outspoken AIDS campaigner since stepping
down as president in 1999, sought to combat the stigma this year when
he publicly announced that his own son Makgatho had died from
AIDS-related causes at the age of 54.

But the fear surrounding AIDS in southern Africa remains a huge
obstacle to fighting the disease, with a lack of clear government
leadership fueling the sense that HIV is a shameful private burden
rather than a public policy emergency.

DISASTER SPREADS

Cameron enjoyed more than a decade of good health despite being
HIV-positive, and when he did eventually fall seriously ill in 1997 he
was able to afford ARVs to keep himself alive.

Millions of other South Africans were not so lucky and the government
dragged its feet on introducing ARVs in the public sector - a delay
activists say cost countless lives.

South Africa's AIDS crisis has been exacerbated by the poverty of much
of the population, where the legacy of apartheid has limited the
spread of basic nutrition and health care.

But Cameron says the Mbeki government veered wildly off course in the
early 2000s under the influence of "denialists" who saw the basic
scientific building blocks of the epidemic as a racist conspiracy to
promote dangerous drugs.

Mbeki questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, and left the
impression his government regarded discussion of the AIDS crisis as an
attempt by white Westerners to denigrate black Africans by questioning
their sexual morality.

"African AIDS denialism demoralized the debate," Cameron said. "It
wrongly ascribes the medical model of HIV virology to some kind of
condemnation of Africans."

At the same time Cameron charges Western drug firms with unfairly
holding up ARV prices until forced to reduce them by lawsuits and
political pressure.

He is clearly angry the country has lost valuable time in fighting
AIDS and may still be moving too slowly. "I believe massive errors
have been made," Cameron said.

But despite the escalating AIDS death rate and the government's opaque
attitude toward the disease, Cameron remains guardedly optimistic the
tide can be turned.

ARVs, once derided by officials as unnecessary and dangerous, are
increasingly available and more and more South Africans are going
public as HIV-positive.

Cameron's message, to his fellow South Africans and to the world, is
that AIDS provides an opportunity for both individuals and societies
to unite in fighting an epidemic

"We cannot allow our grief and our bereavement to inflict a further
loss upon us: the loss of our own full humanity, our capacity to feel
and respond and support," he writes. "AIDS beckons us to the fullness
and power of our own humanity."

050502
RE050502

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