Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who as South Africa’s health minister drew international censure for questioning the causal connection between H.I.V. and AIDS and for promoting dietary measures rather than drugs to treat AIDS, a policy that was held responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, died Wednesday in Johannesburg. She was 69. Her doctor said the cause was complications from a liver transplant in 2007, the South African Press Association reported.
Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang (pronounced cha-buh-LA-lum zih-MANG) lived in exile for nearly three decades as a member of the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid group that became South Africa’s governing party in 1994, before becoming health minister in 1999, with the election of Thabo Mbeki as president. She served in that post until he resigned last year. Echoing Mr. Mbeki’s own widely lambasted views about AIDS, Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang advocated marshaling vitamin and nutritional forces against the H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. She maintained that foods like garlic, lemon, African potatoes and beetroot were stauncher defenses than the antiretroviral drugs that had been proved to prolong the lives of H.I.V.-positive patients and to help prevent the passage of the virus from pregnant women to their babies.
Noting that the drugs had side effects, and adopting the claims of so-called AIDS dissidents who deny a connection between H.I.V. and AIDS, she referred to the antiretroviral drugs as poison. “She was one of the disasters of the post-apartheid era,” said Mark Gevisser, the author of “A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream.” She was not up to the job of health minister, he added. Mr. Mbeki kept her in the job amid intense pressure to dismiss her “because she very, very quickly became his agent in the AIDS wars, and she could continue to ask questions he thought had to be asked but that he couldn’t afford, politically, to ask himself,” Mr. Gevisser said. While Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang was health minister, the estimated number of H.I.V.-infected people in South Africa climbed to more than five million, more than in any other nation. Critics from around the world denounced a South African policy that at first opposed and then delayed the distribution of antiretroviral drugs.
Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang was derisively called Dr. Beetroot, and as time went on the criticism aimed at her and at the Mbeki AIDS policy grew more and more hostile. Speaking at an international AIDS conference in Toronto in 2006, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations envoy on AIDS, called the South African government’s drug policy “obtuse, dilatory and negligent” and said the government “continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state.” The damage was quantified when a study by Harvard researchers released a year ago stated that the South African AIDS policy was responsible for 365,000 premature deaths.
Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang was born in Durban on Oct. 9, 1940, and educated at the University of Fort Hare, a haven for black intellectuals (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu both spent time there) before the African National Congress was banned from the country. In exile, she lived in the Soviet Union, where she received a medical degree, and later in Tanzania, where she studied obstetrics and gynecology. Returning to South Africa in 1990, she at first worked in community health organizations. She was elected to Parliament in 1994 and was chairwoman of the National Assembly’s health committee. Before being appointed to the Health Ministry, she was deputy minister of justice.
Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang was married twice. Her survivors include her husband, Mendi Msimang, former treasurer of the African National Congress, and two daughters.
Source: New York Times
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