There's good news tonight! Thabo Mbeki is going to go to Monrovia to watch Charles Taylor quit and Moses Blah get sworn in. It's an appropriate ceremony for somebody who doesn't think AIDS is real to watch; at least he needn't be told not to drink the water.
I'm not sure that Mbeki ever said that AIDS isn't real. In Africa, nearly everything is called AIDS because that brings money. Malaria doesn't bring money. I was sorry that Mbeki was shut up as he might have caused some truth to be known.
Mbeki was skeptical of the idea that HIV causes AIDS. As a consequence, he dragged his feet in providing nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women, and as such he has condemned millions of children to an early grave.
I'm sorry but that is preposterous. You parlay the unknowns of the consequence of HIV with suspect diagnosis and both political and pecuniary opportunism to make a charge of millions of child deaths. The prevalence of HIV strains in Africa is unknown. What is known is that people don't die from HIV but from secondary infections of diseases like malaria that are presumed to have found opportunity in people with immune systems compromised by HIV. But that too is preposterous. People who die from malaria are being said to have died from AIDS without the presence if HIV antigens. And, of course, malaria never needed HIV to open any doors. The tragedy of Africa is the tragedy of ideology standing in the way of effectively addressing diseases like malaria. For that you can more blame Rachel Carson than Mbeki. ANC Mbeki can rot for all I care but I'm sorry he was shut up for what might have been revealed if he'd kept speaking. And nevirapine is hardly a miracle drug:
Fortunately wiser minds than either Mbeki or decimon have prevailed, and South Africa now has the biggest mother-to-child HIV transmission prevention program in the world.
Those wiser minds have so prevailed that those wiser minds now predict tens of millions of African deaths. But then caring about millions of deaths is just something we give lip service to while keeping prevalent what works for some, eh? I trust that you'll keep us posted on how wiser minds keep improving conditions for Africans.
