THE government rightly received plenty of credit at the 21st International AIDS conference in Durban last week for reversing the deadly lunacy of former president Thabo Mbeki and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.SA is the only high-burden country in Africa that funds more than 80% of its HIV/AIDS programmes itself, with R60bn set aside for this purpose over the next three years. At the last count, there were almost three-and-a-half-million patients on treatment. But quite frankly, it just isn’t enough.The latest research shows SA’s epidemic may be far worse than we thought.As many as 8-million South Africans could have HIV, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a Washington-based research outfit that studies the global burden of disease. This is a considerably higher estimate than the 6.4-million to 6.8-million figure stated by the government. Worse still, more than half-a-million South Africans were infected with the virus in 2015, acc...
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