Source: LA Times
Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the former South African health minister whose AIDS denial and failure to provide treatment is blamed for more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths in the country that has suffered the brunt of the AIDS pandemic, died Wednesday in a Johannesburg hospital from complications of a 2007 liver transplant. She was 69, and press reports suggested that she was being tested for a second transplant.
Like her close friend and frequent defender, former President Thabo Mbeki, Tshabalala-Msimang did not believe that HIV causes AIDS and did not believe in using antiretroviral drugs to treat the disease, instead urging victims to use a concoction of fruits, vegetables and herbs -- which won her international derision as "Dr. Beet Root" or "Dr. Garlic."
Dr. Stephen Lewis, the former United Nations envoy for AIDS in Africa, sharply criticized the AIDS policies of Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang in a 2006 speech in Vancouver, Canada, calling it "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state." The Treatment Action Campaign called her a "murderer" and fought many legal battles attempting to reverse her refusal to provide treatment for the country's 5.7 million HIV-positive people (out of a population of about 50 million).
Activists won a major victory in 2002 in a court case that forced the government to provide antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women to prevent transmission of the virus to their infants. Another decision in 2003 forced the government to provide drugs to people in advanced stages of AIDS.
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http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me-tshabalala...
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