EDITORIAL OPINION

Where angels fear to tread

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki is nobody's fool. His intellectual abilities are well known.

Which makes it all the more puzzling why he persists in questioning whether HIV causes Aids, and why he will let himself be advised by an Aids panel of "dissident" scientists who espouse the notion that HIV is a harmless virus and that "diseases of lifestyle" and poverty cause Aids.

These scientists have been shunned by the international scientific community. The correlation between HIV and Aids is a given in the orthodox medical and scientific world, having been researched and demonstrated years ago.

To question this correlation is much like asserting that rains do not cause floods.

Top South African Aids researchers and scientists like Malegapuru Makgoba have been left off the president's panel, although they have received international acclaim for their work.

Instead, Mbeki has had personal contact with two American Aids "dissidents", according to newspaper reports. An Italian scientist and a Zambian activist are said to have been courted to serve on the panel, which Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is responsible for assembling.

Observers may be forgiven for wondering whether Mbeki has gone this road in search of a way out of committing the government to paying the costs of the alternatives -- costly AZT, or one of the substitutes, to save the babies of pregnant women with HIV, and other expensive drugs to harness the progression of Aids in others infected with HIV.

Maybe the reason is simply that Mbeki loves an intellectual scrap.

Or maybe he is just a natural sceptic.

Whatever the reason, in the long run millions of lives may be lost because the government is playing a "what-if" game instead of tackling the Aids epidemic head on and throwing its full resources enthusiastically into the fight against the pandemic.

Mbeki's sceptical bent in the HIV/Aids controversy is giving him a bad reputation. A New York publication last month accused him of "flirting with pseudoscience".

Mbeki must be supported if he wants to find out more about the suitability and cost effectiveness of antiretrovirals like AZT and nevirapine and the protease inhibitors -- the so-called anti-Aids "cocktails".

But then he should have his health minister put together a panel of distinguished researchers -- not discredited Aids-deniers. And they should not waste their time and taxpayers' money (and maybe even current Aids sufferers' lives) by investigating questions about the safety of AZT, which has been given the thumbs-up in the US and Britain, among other countries.

And they really don't have to ask whether HIV causes Aids.

Hopefully, the panel -- whose brief has not yet been spelt out -- will make a more valuable contribution to the fight against Aids than simply serving some obscure political ends.

q One hopes that Thobo Mxotwa's disturbing exposé of the thuggery taking place in some township schools was shocking enough to provoke some action from the Education Department, the South African National Civic Association in Mdantsane, the South African Democratic Teachers' Union and other teacher unions, as well as principals and parents.

Mxotwa reported in his "Chat Avenue" column in this newspaper yesterday that teachers are assaulted by their pupils and even held up and robbed inside their schools by these thugs in school uniforms.

While no pupil has been shot by a schoolmate in the Eastern Cape (at least, not yet), there are reports of firearm-wielding learners shooting into the air for fun.

All this after Education Minister Kader Asmal said just six months ago, when a Cape Town high school pupil was shot to death in her classroom: "It has redoubled my determination to press ahead with our already announced plan to make schools the centre of community life, places of peace and security for all."

Hah! The fewer pious platitudes from politicians and more tangible action, the better.