He has been helping to conduct a series of epidemiological studies looking at the impact of where and how people live on their risk of contracting AIDS and other chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The life expectancy in southern and eastern Africa has gone down by ten years since the mid-1980s when the AIDS epidemic began. If this goes on there will be more white people than black people in South Africa in 25 years time. In the industrialised world many AIDS patients are treated with an individualised cocktail taken from a list of 15 or 20 anti-retroviral drugs. In Africa where there are four million new cases each year a positive AIDS test is a death sentence.
Sophisticated treatments are available only to the wealthy.
Until recently the South African Government has refused even to accept the link between HIV and AIDS or to import cheap, generic drugs. So the standard treatment in South Africa is giving patients Vitamin A tablets which does seem to be beneficial in reducing the risk of progression. But if the Government there is serious about halting the rate of new infections and increasing the life expectancy of those with the disease much more money needs to be spent on public health education and treatment programmes.