South Africa to Expand Effort to Combat AIDS by Celia W. Dugger

JOHANNESBURG — After an era in which South Africa’s government delayed providing drugs to treat AIDS and prevent women from infecting their newborns, President Jacob Zuma declared Tuesday in a national address on World AIDS Day that drug therapy for H.I.V.-positive pregnant women and babies would be broadened and start earlier.

The new policy on pregnant women, aimed at ensuring babies are born healthy, is in line with the new treatment guidelines issued by the World Health Organization just a day before. The earlier treatment of infected babies is expected to help South Africa, one of only four countries where child mortality has worsened since 1990, improve the survival odds of its youngest citizens.

Mr. Zuma also announced that by April the government would start treating H.I.V.-positive people with tuberculosis earlier, when their immune systems are stronger — a step the World Health Organization said would reduce death rates. Tuberculosis is the leading killer of South Africans with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and deaths from tuberculosis have more than tripled here since 1997.

“What does this all mean?” Mr. Zuma asked in his address, broadcast live on television. “It means that we will be treating significantly larger numbers of H.I.V.-positive patients. It means that people will live longer and more fulfilling lives.”

The alacrity with which the government adopted the health organization’s advice and extended access to AIDS drugs gives substance to Mr. Zuma’s break with the views of his predecessor, President Thabo Mbeki, who had questioned whether H.I.V. causes AIDS and suggested that antiretroviral drugs could be harmful.

Harvard researchers estimated last year that the government’s delay in using antiretroviral drugs earlier in the decade to prevent women from infecting their newborns led to the deaths of 35,000 babies, while 330,000 people died prematurely of AIDS because of the government’s delay in providing treatment.

Despite Mr. Zuma’s break with Mr. Mbeki on AIDS policy, he has apparently rejected a rising public clamor here, even among some of his party’s allies, for a public accounting of Mr. Mbeki’s culpability. The Congress of South African Trade Unions said Monday that Mr. Mbeki should apologize to the nation for his failures in fighting an epidemic it has described as “destroying more lives than any invading army in history.” The Young Communist League has demanded that Mr. Mbeki be prosecuted for genocide.

Mr. Mbeki, asked in a rare interview with the Sunday Independent newspaper published on Nov. 1 if he had any regrets about his nine years as president, made no mention of AIDS.

Mr. Zuma and his party clearly have no desire to open an inquiry into the government’s record on AIDS. Mr. Zuma was Mr. Mbeki’s deputy president until Mr. Mbeki fired him in 2005. And like virtually all the leaders of the African National Congress, Mr. Zuma did not publicly oppose Mr. Mbeki on AIDS.

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