Raymond Tallis is a remarkably productive man. He’s Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester University, and the author of numerous books on philosophy, notably Not Saussure, a critique of the way that post-structuralism has used Saussurean theory, and Enemies of Hope, a general assault on the cynicism of post-modernism.
The Times has been running extracts from his latest book, Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and its Discontents, this week. In this piece he attacks alternative medicine, and has this to say about Mbeki’s policy on AIDS:
In South Africa there has been, in recent years, an appalling example of the effects of a government-sponsored attack on the “hegemony” of Western, science-based medicine in President Mbeki’s refusal to acknowledge that Aids is a sexually transmitted disease caused by a virus that could be prevented or treated by anti-viral drugs. He was attracted by the ideas of Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who claimed that Aids was a lifestyle disease and had nothing to do with HIV. Mbeki would have liked this notion perhaps because it was unorthodox, anti-establishment, anti-pharmaceutical industry and, therefore, somehow allied with his own “anti-colonialist” stance.
Moreover, Mbeki approved of Duesberg’s denial that Aids could be heterosexually transmitted. Given the high prevalence of the disease among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa, Mbeki argued that the conventional story of the sexual transmission of Aids denigrated “black people as vice-ridden germ carriers unable to control their lust”. He brooked no dissent: black people who accepted the orthodox understanding were “negroes of enslaved minds ”.
Of the 70,000 children born annually to HIV-positive mothers in South Africa, about half could have been protected from becoming HIV-positive themselves, and suffering a painful, protracted death, with a single dose of a cheap anti-retroviral drug. Mbeki did what he could to stop this happening. Many of the 800,000 non-infant deaths a year from Aids could also be prevented by making antiretroviral drugs available, but Mbeki’s ideological views did not permit it. According to a recent study (suppressed by the South African Government, which maintains that anti-HIV drugs are toxic and will primarily benefit pharmaceutical companies) immediate provision of such drugs could save up to 1.7 million people by 2010. As one of his former supporters, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, the Most Rev Njongonkulu Ndungane, has said, Mbeki’s Aids policies are as serious a crime as apartheid — and have already killed many more people.
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