by Rian Malan
"Those frightening numbers were all that mattered, it seemed to me. Once they were shown to be accurate, further debate would be rendered obscene and Thabo Mbeki would be guilty as charged, a fool who'd allowed himself to be swayed by a tiny band of heretics universally dismissed as wackos, fringe lunatics and scientific psychopaths. So I set out to confirm the death toll. Just that. I thought it would be easy - a call or two, maybe a brief interview. I picked up the phone. It was my first mistake…"
"So what do poor Africans do if they
fall sick? They go to roadside shacks called "drug stores"
and buy snake oil. Chloroquine for malaria, on a continent where that
former miracle drug has lost most of its curative power; nameless black-market
antibiotics for lung diseases, in a setting where up to sixty percent
of pneumonia is drug-resistant; penicillin for gonorrhoea, administered
by an amateur "injectionist" who might be unaware that the
quantity needed to knock out the infection has risen a hundredfold in
the past decade. For the poorest of the poor, even such dubious nostrums
are beyond reach. They try to cure themselves with herbs, they fail,
and they die." More at http://www.whatisaids.com/rollingstone.htm
