AIDS and poverty are wiping out the adult populations in many South African villages, leaving an exploding number of orphans alone – or in the care of desperately poor, often starving neighbours.
In South Africa around 800 people die daily of Aids. This toll is expected to rise dramatically in the future as increasing numbers of adults, infected in recent years, fall sick.
In the Nkomazi region of Mpumalanga, an area wedged between Swaziland and Mozambique, villagers are struggling to bury what is literally a rising tide of bodies. Care workers carry around white body bags, because patients die frequently and unpredictably, and these days few families can afford coffins.
In the Nkomazi region at least 6.000 children are either orphaned, or living with critically ill parents, the health department estimates. Thousands of these children have attended their parents funerals not knowing who would care for them that night.
And thousands of teenage girls are selling sex – typically contracting HIV in the process – in what is often an effort to feed their infant siblings.
– We are seeing a pattern. First we bury the mother, then the father. Then the eldest ones, the 18- and 19-year-olds, fall sick, said Sally McKibbon, chief executive of non-government organisation Thembalethu, which feeds desperate families and cares for the sick in the region.
In Britain and America, Aids wards have virtually emptied with the advent of anti-retroviral Aids drugs. Eighteen months ago the South African government approved what, on paper, would be the worlds largest anti-retroviral programme.
But health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang does not promote this, and seldom promotes safe sex in her public addresses. Instead she touts nutrition – most famously a diet of olive oil, garlic, lemon juice and beetroot – as the way to raise Aids patients from their deathbeds.
There is no scientific evidence for her claims, although there is a wealth of research in support of anti-retrovirals.
There are currently 48.000 South Africans on the governments anti-retroviral programme. The number is still well short of the 53.000 that the medical experts, who drafted the government plan, aimed to have taking the drugs by early 2004.
And to activists and doctors horror, the health minister recently revealed that the government had never drawn up a timetable for the ambitious programme.
Both Tshabalala-Msimang and President Thabo Mbeki have frequently expressed support for Aids dissidents who are scorned by mainstream, internationally reputed scientists.
In the most recent incident, the health minister last month sided with Matthias Rath, a controversial vitamin salesman who has taken out full-page advertisements in theNew York Timesand South African newspapers stating that anti-retrovirals are toxic and that vitamins can cure both Aids and cancer.
Tshabalala-Msimang said that the Rath Foundation was “not undermining governments position. If anything, it was supporting it.” Last week she denied that this meant she supported Rath.
Meanwhile, those caring for the sick in poor rural areas are at their wits end.
– This disaster is not like a tsunami, where everybody rushes in to help. This one carries on day after day, year after year. People in the Nkomazi region are exhausted from helping, said McKibbon.
– Why can South Africa not turn this epidemic around, like other African countries have done? he asked rethorically.
Kilde: The Push Journal
