Government should immediately adopt a practical plan for treating HIV positive people with drugs, challenged Judge Edwin Cameron last night at the opening of the international conference, AIDS in Context.

“We have been burdened by governmental failings spanning our transition to democracy, and involving an ineptitude on the part of the apartheid government which, grievously, has been matched on the part of our democratic government,” said Judge Cameron.

“From our government, we demand commitment and action now.” Judge Cameron, who publicly disclosed that he was HIV positive last year, said drug companies also needed to make drugs accessible by reducing prices.

“The reductions have been substantial, but they have not been enough.   We know that the drugs have become inexpensive for some.   But we also know that they are still too expensive for most.”

Drug companies’ arguments that Africa lacked the infrastructure to implement anti-retroviral therapy were “illogical, demeaning, insulting and disempowering.”

He praised the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), dramatically changed the terms of the debate for access to treatment at every level.

“TAC has revived a dispirited and disparate movement amongst persons living with AIDS.   It has done so by giving them dignity in hope and dignity in action

“More broadly, the TAC has reminded all South Africans of the importance of strategic and principled activism, built upon effective alliances, in pursuit of elementary justice for those denied it.

Cameron also condemned those who emphasised HIV prevention, and argued that those already infected “must be left to face their fate with sympathy and with what support our already over-stretched national resources can muster”.

“The dichotomy is false. Physiologically, treatment is a form of prevention. This is most dramatically evident in mother to child prevention programmes, where administering drugs to a mother in parturition has a good chance of preventing transmission to her baby. There is also good physiological evidence that an effective course of anti-retroviral medication prevents or substantially inhibits sexual transmission of the virus.”

“Psychologically treatment also enhances prevention, since it affords those already infected with a dramatic incentive to come forward to be tested, to receive counselling, and to engage fruitfully with the complexities of behaviour modification.”

“By treating people we offer them hope.   And by offering hope in this epidemic, we dispel the notion that AIDS is hopeless, that confronting it is fraught with failure, and that once infected the subject can face only debilitation and death.”