Obama Criticizes South African Response to AIDS

By Gordon Bell

Barack Obama, the only black U.S. senator, criticized South African leaders on Monday for their slow response to AIDS and urged President Thabo Mbeki to take a tougher stand against Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

South African AIDS activists say Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has caused confusion by pushing traditional medicines and a recipe of garlic, beetroot, lemon and African potatoes to combat AIDS while underplaying the role of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs.

Obama said Tshabalala-Msimang was making a terrible mistake. "On the treatment side the information being provided by the minister of health is not accurate," he told reporters outside an AIDS clinic in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

"It is not an issue of Western science versus African science, it is just science and it's not right."

Speaking later to journalists during the South African leg of an African tour, Obama said the government in neighboring Zimbabwe had been a disaster for that country.

He urged Mbeki to take a more vocal stand against Mugabe, who he said continued to use conspiracies and plots to hold on to power.

"South Africa has tried a strategy of quiet diplomacy...I don't think it has been as successful as it could have been. I would like to see a more vocal policy in respect of human rights and pressing the Mugabe government to right the ship."

Obama told AIDS activists he planned to take an HIV test during the Kenya portion of his trip, winning immediate praise from South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"That would be very good," Tutu said after holding talks with Obama. "It encourages other people who may be less brave to want to do that. It also helps to deal with the question of the stigma."

Activists at last week's global AIDS conference in Toronto were critical of South Africa's promotion of garlic and lemon as a solution to the AIDS crisis.

South Africa has one of the world's highest HIV/AIDS rates with one in nine -- a total of five million people -- infected.

The government yielded to pressure in 2003 and launched a public ARV program, which officials describe as one of the largest in the world. However, activists say drugs still only reach a fraction of those with AIDS, which kills more than 800 South Africans a day.

Obama and Wife Take AIDS Test in Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya (Aug. 26, 2006) — U.S. Senator Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, publicly visited a clinic and took AIDS tests Saturday in Kenya, where fear and social stigmas have slowed progress in fighting the disease.

Thousands of people gathered around the tiny mobile clinic in Kisumu, western Kenya, while Obama was tested in an effort to draw attention to Africa's AIDS epidemic.

"If you know your status, you can prevent illness," said Obama, the only black legislator in the U.S. Senate. "You can avoid passing it to your children and your wives."

Among Kenya's 32 million population, some 1.2 million people were infected with HIV as of 2004. Relief agencies say the national infection rate is 6.7 percent.

Obama and his wife did not make public the results of their test, but said "we probably wouldn't be smiling" if the results were bad.

Police held back crowds anxious to see the U.S. senator and son of one of their own. Local politicians appealed for calm as Obama visited the clinic, run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Some 700 people die each day from AIDS-related illnesses in Kenya, most in the west of the country, though the numbers of infected patients have declined recently.

In the Kisumu area, almost one in five is infected.

Obama said the country's government has done a better job than many others in Africa of acknowledging the problem and discussing solutions. But people's reluctance to be tested has slowed progress.

Earlier Saturday, thousands of well-wishers lined pot-holed roads to greet Obama as he began a journey to his ancestral home, Nyangoma-Kogelo, a tiny village in the rural west where his father grew up herding goats and attending classes in tin-roofed schools.,p> "I just want to say very quickly that I am so proud to come back home," Obama told the cheering crowds. "It means a lot to me that the people of my father, my grandfather, are here in such huge crowds."

His father, also named Barack Obama, won a scholarship to a university in Hawaii, where he met and married Obama's mother. The two soon separated, however, and Obama's father returned to Kenya and worked as a government economist.

His father died in a car crash in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter. This was Obama's third visit, but his first since becoming senator of the U.S. state of Illinois in January 2005. His last visit was in 1995.

Obama said he was looking forward to seeing his grandmother and uncle, who still live in the village, but that the trip was more than just a family reunion. Both his grandmother and uncle have visited him in the United States, and will get other chances to see him, he said.

The Democratic Party senator said his relatives "understand that some of this is going to be dominated by spectacle, and they'll roll with it as I will roll with it."

He also planned to visit a project he helps fund, which helps grandmothers find money to take care of children orphaned by AIDS.