GOVERNMENTS HINDER AIDS FIGHT THROUGH PERSECUTION, DENIAL

TORONTO --You couldn't blame HIV and AIDS patients in South Africa
for feeling a little conflicted.

On the one hand, official government policy calls for treatment by
scientifically proven anti-retroviral drugs. On the other, the
country's minister of health sometimes known as Dr. Garlic advocates
herbal concoctions and visiting non-medical doctors.

What's more, South Africa's president has questioned whether HIV even
causes AIDS, and his possible successor admitted to knowingly having
unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman.

"People become confused. You have huge amounts of confusion in this
country about how HIV is transmitted, who is vulnerable to HIV,"
complains Sipho Mthathi of the group Treatment Action Campaign in an
interview from Cape Town.

"The government response is largely responsible for the epidemic we have."

In China, meanwhile, AIDS activists have been thrown in jail, beaten
by government-hired thugs and had their disease-prevention websites
censored as pornography.

Russia refuses to let heroin addicts use methadone, helping fuel a
runaway HIV epidemic among injection-drug users.

Cracking the world's HIV pandemic is an uphill battle at the best of
times. But many governments including some represented at the
International AIDS Conference starting here Sunday are actively
obstructing the fight through persecution, misinformation and denial.

"AIDS isn't measles, it isn't tuberculosis. It is a disease that is
associated with very intimate and often very morally disapproving
acts," said Joe Amon, HIV/AIDS co-ordinator for Human Rights Watch.

"It's associated with sex, with drug use. And consequently,
governments have refused to address it quickly, they've denied that
HIV exists initially, they've blamed it on foreigners, they've blamed
it on socially deviant groups."

His organization has issued numerous reports over the last several
years on rights abuses and other government actions that have
hindered the anti-HIV effort, often in countries with the worst epidemics.

But the problem does not just originate in developing countries, he
argues. The United States' government's official adoption of
abstinence as a key strategy against HIV, for instance, is putting a
chill on efforts to encourage safe sex in regions where the virus is
endemic, said Mr. Amon.

Governments that promote policies shown to be largely ineffective,
ignore the HIV threat, spread misinformation or persecute activists
are only stoking the epidemic, said Richard Elliott of the Canadian
HIV-AIDS Legal Network.

"It's a hugely significant problem," he said. "When you discriminate
against people living with HIV, when you discriminate against various
groups at risk of HIV, then you just make the problem worse. You keep
people coming forward for testing. You don't build the trust you need."

Among those nations that often hamper the HIV/AIDS fight, South
Africa is in a "class of its own," said Amon.

Almost one in five adults there is thought to be infected, one of the
highest rates in the world, resulting in more than 5 million people
with the virus, and almost a million with full-blown AIDS. The
government has promised to expand access to AIDS drugs, and so far
about 150,000 receive them.

But Thabo Mbeki, the president, has more than once questioned whether
HIV even causes AIDS. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, his health minister,
extols the virtues of garlic and lemon peel for treating the virus,
and has highlighted the toxic side-effects of those anti-retroviral drugs.

Then earlier this year, Jacob Zuma, the popular deputy leader of the
African National Congress, admitted during his rape trial to not
using a condom when he had sex with an HIV-positive woman. A parallel
epidemic of sexual assault has also been given short shrift by authorities.

Why does the ANC government seem so averse to tackling the crisis
head on? It could be a reluctance to encourage stereotypes among some
Westerners of promiscuous Africans, or to admit to a massive problem
that would require equally massive infusions of money from an
impoverished government, Mthathi said

Like South Africa, China all but ignored its HIV epidemic for years.
The national government has more recently begun to take the issue
seriously, but at the regional level officials have shown a pattern
of repression against AIDS activists, say human rights groups.

The phenomenon has been best documented in Henan province, near
Beijing, where several activists have been jailed for publicly
discussing the disease. Just last month, Li Xige, a postal worker who
was infected with HIV through a blood transfusion, was arrested by
police as she tried to deliver a compensation request to officials in Bejing.

Hu Jia, an activist who helped residents of AIDS-stricken villages,
was detained for several weeks earlier this year.

Some activists have been beaten by thugs hired by local officials.
China's pornography laws have been used to censor or shut down
websites promoting HIV prevention.

In Russia, the HIV problem is particularly severe among intravenous
drug users, but the government continues to outlaw methadone
treatment for heroine addicts. The orally administered narcotic has
been proven elsewhere to help end addictions, and would avoid the
dangers of shared, dirty needles, noted Elliott.

Various government policies in Zimbabwe have prevented most of its
1.5 million HIV-positive patients from receiving needed drugs, says
Human Rights Watch. Those actions include forced evictions of 700,000
residents that have left many HIV sufferers homeless. The evictions
also destroyed 2,000 outlets providing condoms to township residents,
and took away many people's livelihoods, the rights group reported in July.

Uganda has been cited as a success story, with its declining rate of
HIV prevalence. But a routine persecution of gay people will keep
many people with the virus underground, said Elliott.