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Africa's AIDS Battle Successes A Plus For Bush

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The Associated Press

Published: January 11, 2009

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.

Like countless Africans, Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped revitalize the global fight against the disease.

"It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent," says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. "It has changed so many people's lives, saved so many people's lives."

Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women's support group to "share the pain." In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group's vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools.

Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.

Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world's estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 - a goal it says was reached in 2007.

But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is less than 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.

Bush also launched a five-year, $1.2 billion initiative to cut malaria deaths in 15 African nations by half.

Some critics, like rockers-turned-advocates Bono and Bob Geldof, have become admirers.

"The Bush regime has been divisive ... created bitterness - but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives," Geldof wrote in Time magazine as he accompanied Bush on an Africa trip last February.

"The administration and Bush himself deserve a lot more credit than they received for getting this job done," says Josh Ruxin, assistant professor of public health at Columbia University. Desperately poor Rwanda, where Ruxin runs a health care project, now has more than 100 centers where people can receive AIDS testing, counseling and treatment, up from just two in 2002.

The plan's biggest success story is the fortyfold increase in the number of Africans receiving life-prolonging medication in the past five years.

Jones Mubita, a Zambian policeman, had given up hope for his young daughter, a "mere skeleton" covered in boils when she was hospitalized. With the help of AIDS drugs provided by the U.S. government, the child is back at school, he says, beaming.

South Africa is also the biggest single recipient of the plan's money - $590 million last year, more than it received during the Clinton administration, according to U.S. ambassador Eric Bost.

After years of denial about the AIDS crisis by former President Thabo Mbeki, the new government is finally serious about tackling the epidemic.

Supporters and critics alike agree that prevention is the weakest link in global AIDS initiatives. When he launched the plan, Bush said he wanted to prevent 7 million new infections but it is hard to tell whether that has been met.

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