- A devastating report into Aids suppressed by the South
African government because it identifies the disease as the largest killer
in the country and predicts millions more deaths, was finally made public
yesterday after unions, churches and politicians demanded its release.
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- But cabinet ministers spent recent days trying to discredit
what the government-funded Medical Research Council (MRC) called its "shocking"
findings because they fly in the face of President Thabo Mbeki's claim
that Aids is responsible for only a fraction of deaths.
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- "The number of Aids deaths can be expected to grow
within the next 10 years to more than double the number of deaths due to
all other causes, resulting in 5m to 7m cumulative Aids deaths in South
Africa by 2010," the report said.
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- The MRC report estimates that 40% of deaths of South
Africans between the ages of 15 and 49 are Aids-related. The worst hit
group are women in their late 20s and then men in their 30s. It says
one in four pregnant women attending public health clinics carry the Aids
virus. A decade ago, the figure was one in 100. At Chris Hani Baragwanath
hospital in Soweto, the largest hospital in Africa, 43% of all deaths are
because of Aids.
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- Average life expectancy is expected to drop from 54 years
at present to 41 by the end of the decade. At that time, about 780,000
people will be dying each year from Aids, the highest number in any country.
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- "These shocking projections should galvanise efforts
to minimise the devastation of the epidemic," the MRC said.
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- The authors say their report is the outcome of the most
comprehensive investigation to date into the impact of Aids, and that it
was subject to rigorous review, including approval by Peter Goldblatt,
the doctor who is chief medical statistician for England and Wales.
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- But the South African government has stopped just short
of dismissing the report outright in its attempts to downplay and discredit
it.
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- The health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and
Essop Pahad, the president's right-hand man, wrote an article in a Johannesburg
Sunday newspaper deriding the report as a "massive propaganda tool"
in the hands of those who argue for wide distribution of anti-retroviral
drugs, and condemning a "sense of hysteria" over the question
of deaths from Aids.
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- "Existing data, including the MRC report, cannot
be relied on; at most, it's just a work in progress," the ministers
wrote.
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- Dr Tshabalala-Msimang and Mr Pahad again quoted six-year-old
World Health Organisation (WHO) mortality statistics to back up the president's
claim that Aids is not the leading cause of death in South Africa. The
WHO has said the figures are so out of date as to be meaningless.
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- The government's statistics office, StatsSA, also publicly
ridiculed the MRC report last week by saying the researchers had greatly
exaggerated the rates of HIV transmission.
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- StatsSA estimated the number of people who will die of
Aids at no higher than 2m.
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- One of the authors of the MRC report, Rob Dorrington,
poured scorn on that claim.
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- "It is a great shame that StatsSA chose to trash
the MRC report," he said. "Their presentation to the press was
riddled with half-truths and misunderstandings. It gives new meaning to
the phrase 'lies, damn lies and statistics'.
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- "They chose to do it in a very public way, without
talking to us to check on their understanding of what was going on, and
as a result they fed into the debate doubts about the accuracy of the numbers
when the very real problem is the number of people that are dying."
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- The report was ready in July but the government insisted
that it could not be released without cabinet approval.
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- After some findings were leaked earlier this month, the
government came under pressure to make the report public. Cosatu, the trade
union confederation and an ally of the governing African National Congress,
along with the Anglican and Catholic churches and even the ANC's health
committee, joined the call.
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- Instead, the health minister issued a veiled threat to
the MRC, describing the leaks as a "serious situation to be attended
to".
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- The row grew when a prominent anti-apartheid activist
and former human rights commissioner, Rhoda Kadalie, called on Dr Tshabalala-Msimang
to resign.
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- "We have a genocide on our hands and you and your
cohorts have been unwilling to listen to the experts," she said in
a letter to a Johannesburg newspaper. "If the president is making
it impossible to do your work effectively, why not resign with dignity
in defiance of someone who is taking the country down with him?"
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