SA govt under fire over ineffectual Aids policies

If South Africa does not implement a large scale Aids treatment plan soon, five million South Africans will die from Aids in the next eight to 10 years.

This was the message from Western Cape director of health, Dr Fareed Abdullah at the South African Aids Conference in Durban on Tuesday.

He said no Aids programme could be effective without the widespread use of anti-retroviral treatment.

Abdullah, who received a standing ovation from the 4 000 delegates, said, "no country can survive a calamity of this order. There are two options for South Africa, treatment success or treatment failure. A no treatment option does not exist for South Africa."

He called on government to scrap its focus on primary health care, "this is not the time to make cutbacks on component parts of the health service to fund primary care. A case must be made for a new financing framework that will allow health managers to postpone old reform imperatives to reduce spending on secondary and tertiary hospital care in favour of primary health care".

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