Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
THE
BALTIMORE SUN
May 23, 2000, Tuesday ,FINAL
SECTION: TELEGRAPH ,3A
LENGTH: 799 words
HEADLINE:
South African president meets with Clinton on fighting AIDS
Some consider Mbeki an impediment because of unconventional ideas
BYLINE: Jonathan Weisman
SOURCE: SUN NATIONAL STAFF
BODY:
WASHINGTON - President Clinton and his South
African counterpart, Thabo Mbeki, danced delicately around the issue of
AIDS yesterday, agreeing to disagree on the disease's cause
while moving forward on infrastructure and poverty issues that could combat
AIDS indirectly.
The controversy surrounding Mbeki's
questions on the cause and treatment of AIDS threatened to
overwhelm the South African president's first state visit to Washington since he
succeeded Nelson Mandela as president last year.
The White House made it
clear the two presidents wished to focus on areas of agreement, such as the need
to alleviate poverty and improve basic health care in southern
Africa.
Administration officials stressed that Mbeki
fully grasped the scope of the AIDS epidemic.
One out
of 10 South Africans are believed to be infected with HIV, the virus that a vast
majority of medical experts believe causes AIDS, and an
estimated 250,000 will die this year.
That infection rate is expected to
rise to 25 percent of the southern African work force within five years. Life
expectancy is projected to fall to 45, from a high of 59 in the early 1990s.
"These are hard challenges without easy answers," Clinton said in
greeting Mbeki at the White House. "And they will test our partnership."
But administration officials also conceded Mbeki still has "a series of
questions" that remain unanswered in his mind.
Those questions include
whether HIV causes AIDS, whether the drug AZT can reduce
transmission of HIV from infected pregnant mother to fetus, and whether AZT is
too dangerous to distribute widely.
To the scientific establishment, all
three of those questions have long been answered: HIV does cause
AIDS and AZT is effective and not dangerous.
AIDS activists and public health experts fear that
while Mbeki ruminates, his nation's AIDS crisis is going
unaddressed.
" Every day that goes by while he tries to find answers to
questions like this, people are dying," said Kris Torgeson, spokesman for the
international health organization Doctors Without Borders.
Senior
administration officials sought to strenuously deflect that criticism, even as
they conceded their differences with Mbeki.
"President Mbeki has not
faltered one step in fighting this disease in Africa," a senior
administration official said after a series of discussions between Mbeki,
Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
Mbeki also tried to distance himself
from the controversy, telling reporters much of the issue is "pure invention."
His concern over AZT was that simply handing out such drugs without proper
medical supervision could do more harm than good.
"When you dispense
them, you've got to have a strong enough medical infrastructure because of the
potential toxicities and counterindications," Mbeki said.
Mbeki's public
misgivings have proven to be an embarrassment to AIDS
activists, who have battled the Clinton administration -especially Gore - to
force officials to adopt new policies to speed the introduction of cheaper
AIDS drugs to Africa.
During their
fight with the administration, activists painted Mbeki as the hero and Gore, the
likely Democratic presidential nominee, as the villain.
This month,
Clinton issued an executive order to allow South Africa to seek
the best prices for AIDS drugs worldwide, then import them in
bulk, or to find a drug maker to manufacture generic versions, despite existing
pharmaceutical patents.
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky
had sided with the pharmaceutical industry, which contended such efforts would
violate international intellectual property law.
Now,
however, Mbeki, by questioning the efficacy of these drugs, might be the
greatest impediment to their distribution. His deputy president, Jacob Zuma, has
compared dissident scientists who believe HIV does not cause
AIDS to Galileo, who was persecuted for proving that Earth
revolved around the sun.
The South African president convened a panel of
AIDS scientists this month in Pretoria that included dissenters
who maintain that HIV does not cause AIDS.
The meeting
broke down in acrimony after mainstream scientists argued for traditional
AIDS treatments, as dissidents contended the disease was caused
by malnutrition and poor sanitation.
The dissidents argued that the
drugs Mbeki had once fought so hard to introduce could cause the maladies that
kill AIDS victims.
"A waste of time is putting it
mildly," University of California molecular biologist Peter Duesberg said of
drug therapy.
Duesberg even questioned reports of an
AIDS crisis in southern Africa, calling them
overblown.
AIDS activists will pack a speech Mbeki is
to give today in San Francisco, hoping to persuade the South African to meet
with more mainstream scientists.
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