|
Manto: SA doing 'pretty well'
20/08/2006 23:20 - (SA)
Johannesburg - Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang defended her Aids policies on Sunday after a blistering attack by a top United Nations official.
But, newspapers said she had made the country a laughing stock and demanded her resignation.
Tshabalala-Msimang blamed South Africa's poor media coverage at last week's global Aids conference in Toronto on the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), whose activists led criticism of her government's policies.
"I think South Africa did very well," Tshabalala-Msimang told SABC radio.
"I think the TAC was just a disgrace, a disgrace not only to the (health) department, but a disgrace to the whole country.
"But, I think, as South Africa, we really demonstrated that we are doing pretty well."
'Lunatic' approach
TAC supporters were blamed for attacking South Africa's stand at the Toronto conference.
The stand included a display of Tshabalala-Msimang's often-criticised prescription of olive oil, beetroot and garlic as a defence against Aids.
The conference ended on Friday with a broadside delivered by Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy on Aids in Africa, who derided South Africa's "lunatic" approach to a pandemic which infects an estimated one in nine of its 45 million people.
South African newspapers on Sunday joined the fray, describing the Toronto display as "a salad stand" and demanding that President Thabo Mbeki - who is also often accused of mishandling the Aids crisis - sack his controversial minister.
"Tshabalala-Msimang has become a comic figure, who comes
across as a clown, if her behaviour in Toronto is anything to go
by," said the Sunday Times in an editorial.
"For how long must South Africans suffer the embarrassment of a senior cabinet minister who does not appear to take her work seriously?"
The government has frequently been criticised for acting too slowly against Aids and remaining reluctant to provide patients with antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, the only medication known to slow the progress of the disease.
The government did launch a public ARV programme in 2003 and is now providing the drugs to about 175 000 people.
'Should move to agriculture department'
But activists say the drugs reach only a fraction of the people who need them and accuse Tshabalala-Msimang of creating deadly confusion by continuing to promote her home-grown approach to the disease.
City Press Sunday columnist Khathu Mamaila wrote that Tshabalala-Msimang's determination to promote natural foods such as beetroot and garlic instead of ARVs had "reduced South Africa to an international joke".
"Maybe she should be allowed to work for the department of agriculture," he said.
- Reuters
|
News
HIV/Aids Special Report
