Aids did not sneak up on South Africa. Experts and researchers have been sounding the alarm since the early 1980s, when central and eastern African countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda were hit with the first stages of the epidemic. Sub-Saharan Africa, with Zimbabwe and Zambia at the core, is now the world's Aids epicentre. Fate handed South Africa fair warning about Aids, sophisticated medical tools to fight the epidemic, as well as the brains and the media power to formulate a message and deliver it. Yet the result has been dismal failure.
Aids is set to engulf South Africa in exactly the same way it devastated the rest of the continent.
What's really depressing is that countries seem to have a very hard time learning from each other. They all seem to have to learn the same lessons,'' says Dr Alan Whiteside, an Aids researcher at the University of Natal in Durban. We've reached the panic stage, and now everyone is looking for a quick fix. In reality, there is no quick fix. A risk scenario conducted by the Metropolitan Life insurance company predicts that more than six million people in South Africa will be infected by 2005, and by then more than 2,5-million people will have died.