Judge takes on S.Africa's AIDS "denialists"

White, wealthy and proudly gay, Judge Edwin Cameron is hardly a typical face of the AIDS pandemic ravaging southern Africa.

But Cameron, a member of South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal and the only senior public servant in the country to publicly disclose he has HIV, shares one thing with millions of other Africans fighting the virus: a strong desire to live and a deep anger over halting efforts to fight the disease.

In a new book Cameron dissects Africa's AIDS crisis, a public health emergency that the United Nations estimates could infect up to 89 million more Africans by 2025.

It is a disaster he blames in part on African "AIDS Denialism", the prism that some leaders including South African President Thabo Mbeki have used to downplay or dismiss scientific knowledge on AIDS.

His book, "Witness to AIDS", is an indictment of Western drug firms which he says kept AIDS medicine out of reach of most Africans for far too long and the failure of South Africa's leaders to face up to the debacle.

"We have had leaders referring to AIDS in their families, but never in themselves," Cameron said in an interview. "We still don't have the heartfelt, unambiguous, insistent quality of leadership on AIDS that one would want."

South Africa in 2003 bowed to domestic and international pressure and launched a public programme of anti-retroviral (ARV) drug treatment, a sign of hope for millions.

But implementation has been slow, thousands are still dying, and AIDS remains both politicised and stigmatised.

ONE VICTIM AMONG MILLIONS

Cameron's career - not just his HIV status - makes him uniquely qualified to examine South Africa's response to AIDS, increasingly depicted as a human rights issue for the estimated 5 million South Africans infected with the disease.

A human rights lawyer, Rhodes scholar at Britain's Oxford University and one of Nelson Mandela's first appointments to South Africa's High Court following the end of apartheid in 1994, Cameron had for almost a decade been publicly out as a gay man, a rarity in South Africa at the time.

He was also operating with the private knowledge that in 1986 he was diagnosed with HIV.

Cameron's personal struggle with HIV reflects the terror that surrounded the disease before life-prolonging ARV drugs were introduced in the early 1990s.

"AIDS put a short, sudden and shocking limit on my life," he wrote in the book, which will be published in Britain, China and the United States later this year.

"In December 1986 it was for me what for tens of millions of Africans it still is today - an imminent term of death."