Diet does count, says Mbeki
    April 22 2005 at 09:26AM

By Christelle Terreblanche and Hans Pienaar
President Thabo Mbeki believes his controversial views on the importance
of nutrition in fighting Aids have been vindicated by health experts.

This emerged in his reply to a question in Singapore, after he delivered
the Singapore Lecture on his first state visit to this tiny but wealthy
Asian country. He was the 26th leader to deliver the lecture since it
began in 1980.
Mbeki, who has maintained a silence on the Aids issue for a long time,
responded comprehensively to a member of the audience who asked him why
his views on Aids had caused such controversy.
 
"I hope there is no longer a controversy," he said, and then referred to a
World Health Organisation conference held in Durban last week.
"The WHO was saying that in order to deal with the challenge of Aids, it
is critically important that there must be the focus on nutrition," he
said.

He was referring to a conference organised by the Washington-based
International Food Policy Research Institute, which looked at the links
between nutrition and HIV and Aids.
At that conference, the institute's senior researcher Stuart Gillespie,
said: "Malnutrition and food insecurity heightens susceptibility to HIV
exposure and infection, while Aids in turn exacerbates and even
precipitates hunger and malnutrition."

Mbeki said his take was that without a focus on nutrition, other
interventions against HIV and Aids were worthless.

He said that at the conference experts had conceded that there was no
one-size-fits-all solution, and that a wide range of divergent experiences
and responses had to be taken into account in fighting HIV and Aids.
"One of the things that we have raised was that it is perfectly clear and
simple ... that the issue of poverty is one of the issues that is quite
central in the fight against Aids," he said.
He then went on to explain in detail why SA needed to formulate a
comprehensive plan to fight Aids.
He cited the example of a $50-million (R300-million) a year grant by
American drug company Pfizer to South Africa for Aids medicine.

This had to be accompanied by additional investment in testing facilities
and dispensing infrastructure, and the training of health workers by the
company to make it effective.
"It is not mere availability (of drugs) .... There's a whole range of
other things that are needed. So when we respond to the Aids challenge it
would not be just giving people a pill and you think you have addressed
the problem," Mbeki said.
"Quite why it became controversial, I don't know. To me it was pretty
simple. That is what caused the controversy, but I think now that people
have understood."
In a statement issued from Cape Town, the DA's health spokesperson, Dianne
Kohler-Barnard, said: "Medical research shows that healthy eating can, to
a point, be effective in holding back the progression of HIV into
full-blown Aids.

"But nutrition alone will not stop the decimation of the CD4 count by the
HI virus - only antiretrovirals can do that," Mbeki concluded -
Independent Foreign Service
*    This article was originally published on page 2 of The Mercury on April
22, 2005