South Africa to treat all HIV-positive babies

PRETORIA, South Africa - South Africa will treat all HIV-positive babies and expand testing, the president announced Tuesday – a dramatic and eagerly awaited shift in a country that has more people living with HIV than any other.

President Jacob Zuma’s speech on World AIDS Day was viewed as a definitive turning point for a nation where the previous administration distrusted drugs developed to keep AIDS patients alive and instead promoted garlic treatments.

One Harvard study said that resulted in more than 300,000 premature deaths.

Zuma compared the fight against AIDS to the decades-long struggle against the apartheid government.

The struggle ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela in the country’s first multiracial elections.

“At another moment in our history, in another context, the liberation movement observed that the time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight,” Zuma said. “That time has now come in our struggle to overcome AIDS. Let us declare now, as we declared then, that we shall not submit.”

Zuma was greeted with a standing ovation when he entered a Pretoria exhibition hall filled with several thousand people.

In some ways, Zuma is an unlikely AIDS hero.

In 2006, while being tried on charges of raping an HIV-positive family friend, he was ridiculed for testifying that he took a shower after sex to lower the risk of AIDS. He was acquitted of rape.

Zuma, a one-time chairman of the country’s national AIDS council, may never live down the shower comment.

But he has won praise for appointing Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi as his health minister. AIDS activists say Motsoaledi trusts science and is willing to learn from past mistakes.

UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe, who took the podium shortly before Zuma, told the president: “What you do from this day forward will write, or rewrite, the story of AIDS across Africa.”