POVERTY AND DESTITUTION EXPLAINS THE POOR HEALTH STATUS OF BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS Dear Mr. Editor When President Mbeki and I repeatedly focus on issues of grinding poverty and destitution as the main reasons for the extremely poor health status of Africans, we are piloried by all the media in South Africa. The media's unbalanced preoccupation with HIV=AIDS=DEATH prevents any meaningful attempts to examine crucial health indices such as the deprivation index for South Africa. Hats off to The Sunday Times (July 28th, 2002) Michael Schmidt, Andre Jurgens and Bobby Jordan lead with a front page headline story "Dread diseases hit SA's starving kids". These reporters must be congratulated for putting up this story together even though they have failed to question Bob Gallo's and Luc Montagnier's assumption that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Although it is true that millions face death due to famine across our orders, we need to look internally at our own situation in front of us. "Three-quarters of all South Africans do not have enough food'. Infant mortality, chronic malnutrition, marasmus, kwashiorkor an hypoproteinaemia as listed in the report can all be explained in terms of grinding poverty, squalor and deprivation. It is futile to focus on political correctness around issues of assumed heterosexual AIDS at the expense of the real issue of poverty. This "political correctness" in South Africa has endowed AIDS a special status which prohibits explicit recognition of high risk groups such as homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Antiretroviral drugs are no substitute for food in Africa. Infant mortality, stunted growth and the link with poverty have been well documented in South Africa by Professors Reid and Moosa at the Durban Medical School in the sixties, i.e. long before the advent of HIV. These two professors noted then that 50% of black children in Natal were dead before reaching the age of five. (Archives of Race Relations in South Africa Braamfontein). What we are seeing today as The Sunday Times article shows is nothing new. What is new is that those of our citizens from the former Apartheid Homelands are free to travel, seek hospital care, seek work and live in any part of South Africa. The Sunday Times deserves an Oscar for this story, but one wonders whether AIDS Inc. will allow the paper to focus on poverty. Yours sincerely
 TORONTO
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