US AIDS program in Africa: 'massive entitlement' or biggest success of 50 years?
US AIDS program in Africa: 'massive entitlement' or biggest success of 50 years?
- Fifteen years ago, there was no shortage of ways to measure the growing scale of the HIV crisis here. It was visible in the country’s spiraling death toll and its overburdened hospitals, in the sputtering proclamations from the country’s president and health minister claiming that HIV drugs were “poison,” and in their recommendations of a treatment of rest and good diet.
- Fifteen years ago, there was no shortage of ways to measure the growing scale of the HIV crisis here. It was visible in the country’s spiraling death toll and its overburdened hospitals, in the sputtering proclamations from the country’s president and health minister claiming that HIV drugs were “poison,” and in their recommendations of a treatment of rest and good diet.
But
for David Clark, a South African doctor and HIV researcher, there was
perhaps no starker measure of the epidemic’s destructive path than the
rapid growth of the massive cemetery hugging one of Johannesburg’s major
highways, where he watched new graves shoot up like wildflowers and the
soil become pockmarked with dozens of gaping holes – a queue of newly
dug graves waiting be filled.