In many ways, South African President Thabo Mbeki has been the darling of the western community, in particular of the rulers in Washington. He is urbane, intelligent, well-spoken. His views on economic reform in his country strongly correspond to those of international finance, and he has been instrumental in pushing through many economic policies in the teeth of opposition from trade unions and those in his own party, the African National Congress. His foreign policy, especially as it relates to Sub-Saharan Africa, has also generally been such as to bring smiles on Capitol Hill. For these reasons and others, mainstream press in the West has been almost unanimous in awarding him kudos.
 
Yet in recent weeks this approbation has quite suddenly been withdrawn. The international media has expressed not just scorn but distaste on some of his pronouncements, and others have reacted in a near-hysterical manner, threatening to boycott a major international conference that is soon to be held in Durban. What explains this sudden shift in reaction ?
 
The issue at hand relates to one of the most pressing and urgent problems in much of Sub-Saharan Africa today, the rapid and apparently uncontrollable spread of AIDS. The proliferation of AIDS is most extensive and rapid in countries like Zambia and South Africa, and this spread was aided until recently by government inaction or inability to take even certain minimal measures for its control. In addition, in this region it is a disease transmitted primarily by heterosexual contact, unlike in the West, so that the population at risk is far greater.
 
The current controversy relates to Mbeki's suggestion that the existence of AIDS may not necessarily be related to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This is in fact a link which is currently taken for granted by most of the scientific and medical establishment, and forms the basis for almost all known treatment. If this link is unambiguous, then South Africa's problems are already hair-raising. The government estimates that an estimated 4.2 million of South African have already contracted the HIV virus, with 1,700 people newly infected every day. The Ministry Health has said the 10th national antenatal HIV survey showed that on a national scale, 22 percent of tested pregnant women were HIV positive.
 
On the basis of this evidence of HIV in South Africa and other countries, some estimates project that several sub-Saharan nations, including South Africa, will lose a quarter of their populations to AIDS by 2010. According to some health specialists, the problem of spread of infection is further compounded by the degree of denial on the part of the government and fatalism on the part of the general population, which have limited systematic efforts to contain the disease in the same manner as in (for example) Thailand.
 
Mbeki's recent views have been strongly influenced by some dissident US-based scientists who have been arguing for some time that there is no conclusive evidence that the virus is the necessary or sufficient cause of AIDS. The more prominent of these scientists is Dr. Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the world's leading experts on retroviruses.
 
Duesberg's credentials are impeccable. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of an Outstanding Investigative Grant from the National Institutes of Health in 1985. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for his work in discovering oncogenes, thought to be a cause of cancer, in viruses. But he derailed his chances of winning when he cautioned that his findings did not prove that there were cancer genes in cells, as was popularly theorised at the time (and is still an unproven theory).
 
In a number of papers published in scientific journals, Duesberg has argued that HIV is too inactive, infects too few cells, and is too difficult to even find in AIDS patients to be responsible. And since the virus is notoriously difficult to isolate, antibody detection has become the indicator of infection - something Duesberg protests is highly inconsistent. When antibodies are dominant over a virtually unfindable virus, this has always meant the immune system has triumphed over the invader, not capitulated to it. Finally, there are many established AIDS cases without any HIV, virus or antibody, further weakening the hypothesis.
 
Faced with these findings, The Centers for Disease Control of the USA dealt with the issue by changing the definition of what an AIDS patient is to necessarily include HIV infections, so that most descriptions are now routinely as HIV-AIDS. But hundreds of HIV-free, certified AIDS cases surfaced again at the 1992 International Conference on AIDS, and now are estimated to total over 4,000. At that point the CDC changed the name of the disease. Duesberg contends that this semantic play only further distracts from the likelihood that HIV does not cause AIDS.
 
These views have been supported by other eminent scientists, such as Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and David Rasnick, another expert in the area. However, the bulk of the scientific and medical community is firmly aligned on the other side. Mbeki has instructed the South African Health Ministry to set up a 20-member international panel, including Duesberg and Rasnick, to test assumptions about the disease. In response to criticism about their inclusion, he said that "the matter is critical... The reason we are doing all of this is to be able to respond correctly to what is reported to be a major catastrophe on the African continent. You can't respond correctly by closing your eyes and ears to any point of view. "
 
However, even a minority representation (2 out of 20, after all) in such a committee seems too much for mainstream health specialists to handle. Mbeki's interest in the dissident views has been strongly criticised by the mainstream group, with many scientists going to the extent of suggesting that President Clinton and other western leaders should put pressure on him to conform to the current mainstream position, and others threatening to boycott the international conference on AIDS which will be held in South Africa in July this year.
 
Such reaction may have been what prompted the latest salvo by the South African President, a highly emotional letter sent on April 3, 2000 to various heads of state including Clinton and Koifi Annan at the United Nations. Besides detailing the country's efforts to battle the epidemic that has infected one in 10 South Africans, Mbeki also defended South Africa's contacts with scientists who argue that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and that AZT, a medication commonly used to prevent transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to their children, does more harm than good.
 
"Not long ago, in our own country, people were killed, tortured, imprisoned and prohibited from being quoted in private and public because the established authority believed that their views were dangerous and discredited. We are now being asked to do precisely the same thing that the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed did, because it is said, there exists a scientific view that is supported by the majority, against which dissent is prohibited.''