You can't fight HIV/AIDS with garlic and lemon potatoes

Much was made this past week of Sen. Barack Obama's trek to Africa, where he not only stopped to visit his father's village in Kenya (his father died in 1982 in an auto accident), but he also took the time to get an HIV/AIDS test (as did his wife), trying to reassure Kenyans that there is no stigma in getting tested for the virus. I hope this has a real effect...already, Kenyan Church Leaders are echoing Sen. Obama's call for mass HIV testing.

But another important, watershed moment happened on Sen. Obama's visit, and it happened in South Africa. HIV/AIDS activists in South Africa mobilized to call for the resignation of South Africa's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who has consistently played down the role that Anti-Retroviral (ARV) medicines can play in treating HIV/AIDS. Instead, the health minister pushes a recipe of garlic, beetroot, and lemon potatoes as a treatment for the disease.

Now, I hate drug companies just as much as the next sane person, and worry constantly that the developing world is just one big playground for corps like Novartis and Pfizer, ala "The Constant Gardener." (Brilliant movie, if you haven't seen it yet.) But in South Africa, one in nine people is infected with HIV. Throwing potatoes at these numbers is like trying to piss on a forest fire.

I'm glad that Sen. Obama also took the chance during his Africa trip to publicly scold the South African health minister. If one person wakes up tomorrow wanting to take ARVs as opposed to nutritional supplements, then the cycle of change has already begun.

For more good information on this, go to the Treatment Action Campaign's Web site, http://www.tac.org.za/. Here you can also sign the Campaign's "5 Demands" for South Africa President Thabo Mbeki, and the South African health minister.

To put it in perspective, here's a quote from Rob Glaser, the CEO of RealNetworks and the founder of the Glaser Progress Foundation in Seattle (incidentally, I applied for a job with the Glaser Foundation several years ago, and was turned down. Nonetheless, I'll bury the hatchet here!): "Seven million innocent European Jews were killed in the 1940s, and we rightly called it a Holocaust. Eleven million innocent Africans have died of AIDS so far this decade because they were unable to get the drugs that would save their lives. What do we call that?"

Good question, and I think we all know the answer.