S.Africa cites progress on AIDS

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa, which has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, has made headway in fighting the HIV virus, but condom use is still insufficient, government leaders said on Saturday.

One in nine South Africans are infected with HIV, but President Thabo Mbeki's government has been criticised for not doing enough to halt the spread of the disease despite the heavy economic and human toll.

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang cited a study showing a decline in HIV among pregnant women -- a benchmark used to measure infection amongst the broader population.

"The report of the 2006 antenatal survey results released this year showed a decrease in the prevalence of HIV amongst pregnant women who use public health facilities," she was quoted as saying by news agency SAPA.

"It is down to 29.1 percent in 2006 compared to 30.2 percent in 2005 ... The decline in the under 20s from 15.9 percent in 2005 to 13.7 percent in 2006, in particular suggests a possible reduction in new infections in the population," she said at an event to mark World AIDS day in the northern Limpopo province.

Mbeki, who has been criticised for not taking the lead in the charge against AIDS, called on South Africans to use condoms.

"What is really of importance is that we must, all of us, take these messages very seriously, particularly our young people," Mbeki said on SABC public radio.

STAR-STUDDED CONCERT

Mbeki's predecessor, Nelson Mandela, staged a star-studded concert expected to be attended by 50,000 in Johannesburg on Saturday to raise money for his AIDS charity.

"A few days ago, the United Nations estimated that more than 33 million people around the world are living with HIV. This lower figure suggests that prevention programmes have been successful in bringing down infection rates," Mandela said.

"That trend is encouraging but it is still alarming that for every person that receives treatment there are four others that are newly infected," he told the crowd.

Elsewhere in Africa, events were also held to mark World Aids Day. In Niger, around 3,000 people, mostly women and young people, marched through the capital Niamey to demand more measures to help AIDS sufferers.

In the small West African state of Benin, President Thomas Boni Yayi headed a march to show solidarity for AIDS victims.

The Johannesburg concert was to include performances from singers Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, and Corinne Bailey Rae and its proceeds will go towards HIV/AIDS programmes throughout southern Africa, the epicentre of the worldwide AIDS epidemic.

The government relented to pressure and launched a plan to provide life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs in 2003, after Mbeki had questioned the safety of the medication and expressed doubts about widely accepted science on the link between HIV and

AIDS.

But activists have complained that the programme is moving far too slowly, causing several hundred deaths each day. Some 700,000 HIV patients are without treatment, especially bad in rural areas where clinics are saturated with a backlog of cases.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who took on South Africa's apartheid government as the country's first black bishop and won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said the battle was far from won.

"We face a monumental crisis, one that was horribly exacerbated when we wasted valuable time in futile academic discussions and debates about the causes of AIDS," he said in a speech to diplomats on Friday.

"We were fiddling whilst our Rome was burning. People who would have been alive today, died needlessly."