Sydney Herald (Oz)

Minister offers her own cure for AIDS

By Ed O'Loughlin, Herald Correspondent in Johannesburg

A senior South African Cabinet minister is manufacturing and distributing a "traditional" AIDS remedy from the garage of her rural home.

The Public Works Minister, Ms Stella Sigcau - a teacher by training - has reportedly concocted a medicine based on boiled peach leaves and hopes to have it patented. "I don't want the whole world to know the ingredients. That's why I am keeping it a secret," she told The Sunday Times of Johannesburg.

"I believe traditional medicine may have a role to play in combating viral diseases and should be assessed."

News of Ms Sigcau's remedy has been greeted with dismay by AIDS activists, who have long criticised the Government's allegedly unscientific approach to HIV/AIDS.

While experts think about 5million of South Africa's 40million people are living with HIV, President Thabo Mbeki has repeatedly questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, and even whether the disease exists.

Despite calls from international health experts for a strong government lead in tackling the world's worst AIDS epidemic, Mr Mbeki and several of his ministers have suggested that poverty, and not a virus, is the cause of the disease.

Ms Sigcau, a former prime minister of the collaborationist Transkei homeland government during the apartheid era, survived the transition to black rule largely through her status as a senior member of the Xhosa royal family.

Seen as a key ally of Mr Mbeki in the African National Congress's heartland of the Eastern Cape, she refused last year to say whether she accepted that there was a link between HIV and AIDS.

At the time she told a parliamentary briefing that it was her job to deal with poverty relief, and that the Government should concentrate on tackling the poverty that made people susceptible to disease.

Revelations about the her home-made cure come as the Government is under mounting criticism for its failure to provide anti-retroviral drugs for those with HIV/AIDS.

The Government, despite having defeated the international pharmaceutical industry in a court case over drug prices earlier this year, is still refusing to allow state health services to provide anti-retroviral drugs to the poor, even in the small and cheap doses needed to prevent mother-to-child transmission.

Ms Sharon Ekambaram, of the AIDS Consortium pressure group in Johannesburg, said the Health Department was still holding up mother-to-child transmission prevention schemes despite having approved them late last year.

The department has blamed the delay on its continuing concerns over the possible toxicity of the drugs, which are licensed in the West. Mr Mbeki, an economist, has in the past publicly claimed that anti-retroviral drugs are dangerously toxic.

Ms Ekambaram said it was unclear whether Ms Sigcau was selling her medicine or dispensing it free, but the law required that all medicines - even traditional ones - be submitted for official approval.

"This is increasing the confusion around HIV treatment, and it's not helping the department of health," she said.

Public education efforts to combat the transmission of HIV in several parts of Africa have at times been set back by the announcement of various miracle cures, including one briefly sponsored by the Kenyan Government.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 2001

Answers

Some folks say that the drug treatment is as bad or worse than the ailment itself.

The US is the worst by far, mainly because the pharmacutical industry fights so hard against any treatment that does not include their drugs, no matter that they have nothing that really helps.

Also, AIDS is not a disease, it is a syndrome. That is what the S stands for in AIDS.

Once your immune system fails utterly, you die from most anything; simple colds can be killers. The AIDS patient is more at risk from healthy people than vice versa.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2001