SANAC needs complete overhaul

MEDIA STATEMENT RELEASED BY:
DR RUTH RABINOWITZ MP
IFP SPOKESPERSON ON HEALTH


September 20, 2006

In her address to parliament today, Dr Ruth Rabinowitz, the Inkatha Freedom Party's Health Spokesperson said that SANAC needs a complete overhaul if it is to succeed in future.

In the eight years since SANAC was launched, it has at best been a lame duck, at worst a means of further inflicting government control on the way AIDS is funded and managed.

It is administratively weak, meets irregularly and has both government persons as Chair and Deputy Chair. The Deputy President has already presided over the organisation for a year.

The latest move to appoint the Deputy President as Chair of an intergovernmental AIDS committee could be a mere window dressing exercise in response to the outcry from international and national bodies, following the latest conference in Toronto.

There are no signs that there will be a change in government's will to treat AIDS as a war, in spite of its deadly toll of 900 people each day.

There is also little to demonstrate decisive handling of the extremely resistant TB, which could be even more devastating than HIV and will be less selective in those it affects.

SANAC is the body that should already have applied to the WHO Green Light Committee for assistance in providing free medicines to South Africans who are infected by the extremely resistant TB.

SANAC should be restructured to be strictly independent, meet regularly and offer a platform to international donors. It must pool the energies and donations of local and international donors of goodwill, transmit their input uncensored to government, and decisively steer the country away from the current path of hopelessness and unbearable pain that it is currently treading.


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Dr Ruth Rabinowitz MP: 082 579 3698
Liezl van der Merwe: 083 611 7470