South Africa Marks AIDS Treatment Milestone

On Friday in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township, patients and government officials gathered to mark the 10th anniversary of the Doctors Without Borders program that launched AIDS treatment for the nation's poor. The success of DWB's work repudiated the concerns of some international experts, who had questioned South Africans' ability to comply with the drugs' complicated dosing requirements. "The West or the Northern world said that we were too poor to treat; they said, 'They can't even tell the time,'" said Vuyiseka Dubula of the Treatment Action Campaign. "To their surprise, we beat them on adherence. We adhere better than they do." The program's results bode well for efforts to increase treatment access nationwide, said Giovanni Perez, a provincial official. Without DWB, "I would not have received this treatment, and I would not have survived," said one of the clinic's first patients, now age 40. In 2009, following years of government denialism, President Jacob Zuma introduced an ambitious campaign to test more South Africans for HIV and get those infected into treatment.

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