South Africa’s AIDS-Denialist Health Minister Dies

South Africa’s former health minister and AIDS-denialist, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has died of complications related to a liver transplant at a Johannesburg hospital.
Her physician, Professor Jeff Wing, of the Witwatersrand University’s Donald Gordon Medical Centre told the Business Day she had died of complications to a liver transplant she received two years ago.
The 69-year-old former health minister had been controversial, arguing for a mixture of beetroot, spinach, garlic and olive oil and African potato instead of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. Tshabalala-Msimang questioned the link between the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and AIDS, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence.
News24 quoted her as saying in 2004:
I have always said there are three options... and we must remember that ARVs are not a cure and they do have side effects.
Her views put then President Thabo Mbeki’s policies in the international limelight when a civil rights group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) vandalised a South African Health Department stand displaying examples of Tshabalala-Msimang’s vegetables at an AIDS conference in Canada in 2006.
Former UN AIDS envoy, Stephen Lewis, also attacked her government for being negligent in its ARV rollout.
A study done by Harvard University Harvard School of Public Health said some 300,000 people had died of AIDS while ARVs could have lengthened their lives considerably, the Mail and Guardian newspaper wrote. Pride Chigwedere and colleagues wrote in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
We contend that the South African government acted as a major obstacle in the provision of medication to patients with Aids.
Tshabalala-Msimang left South Africa in 1962, shortly after the African National Congress (ANC) was banned. She went to the Soviet Union and graduated as a medical doctor from the First Leningrand Medical Institute in 1969. She added a diploma in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1972. She spoke both Russian and Swahili fluently.
She later worked in health services in Tanzania and Botswana, returning to South Africa in 1990, where she was first elected to parliament in 1994.