Thabo Mbeki. Picture: SUNDAY TIMES
Thabo Mbeki. Picture: SUNDAY TIMES

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FORMER president Thabo Mbeki on Monday questioned the amount spent by the government on trying to combat and treat HIV/AIDS as opposed to tuberculosis (TB) — the leading cause of deaths in SA.

"What justifies spending 16% of the national health budget on a ‘disease’ which in 2013 accounted for 5% of all deaths?" Mr Mbeki stated.

In his second missive to the nation on the epidemic‚ he also wonders whether AIDS is being racially reported in official records.

He said a Statistics SA Report on Mortality in 2013 found that among black Africans "HIV disease" was the second leading cause of death and the sixth for the coloured population group but there were no data on the leading causes of death for white and Indian racial groups.

Mr Mbeki asked: "Why are black Africans unique among all sections of the South African population such that only they die from ‘HIV disease’ as the second leading cause of death‚ accounting for as much as 6.2% of all black African deaths? Could it be that the reported incidence of ‘HIV disease’ as it appears in ‘death notices’ is informed by various stereotypes that have emerged around the efforts to identify the causes of HIV infection and AIDS?"

He said further: "The nomenclature used by Stats SA suggests that there exists a unique disease called ‘HIV disease’ which itself results in other diseases such as the well-known ‘infectious and parasitic diseases’ etc! HIV is a virus‚ not a disease. What then is the suggested unique ‘HIV disease’? Obviously this is not a mistaken reference to AIDS as AIDS is not a disease but a syndrome‚ ie a collection of diseases!"

In his letter last Monday‚ Mr Mbeki claimed: "I never said ‘HIV does not cause AIDS’. This false accusation was made by people who benefited from trumpeting the slogan ‘HIV causes AIDS’ as though this was a religious edict. What I said was that ‘a virus cannot cause a syndrome’."

Prof Salim Abdool Karim‚ the director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in SA‚ dismissed Mr Mbeki’s argument‚ telling The Times that it confirmed the he remained "firmly an AIDS dissident" and criticised Mr Mbeki’s belief that "a virus cannot cause a syndrome".

"He is simply ill-informed and/or is deliberately trying to cloud the facts‚ which are that viruses can cause syndromes; HIV is one such virus that leads to a syndrome‚" said Prof Karim.

In 2014‚ Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi‚ when announcing that an additional 2-million people with HIV would be put on treatment in the next three years‚ said: "People like asking me whether the country can afford it. The answer is: Can we afford not to? Here is a disease that is blocking development in our country and we want to bring it to an end. That means we need to spend money and we will do so."

About 2.5-million South Africans were already being treated with antiretrovirals (ARVs) that year.

The Rural Health Advocacy Project’s Daygan Eagar praised the decision‚ noting it was cheaper to treat people with ARVs costing less than R80 a month than to treat them when they were made sick by AIDS-related infections.

TMG Digital