How the country's leader was converted by the deniers

President Mbeki has long been an Aids denier. While surfing the internet during a sleepless night in the late 1990s, it is said he came across a website promulgating the thoughts of Peter Duesberg, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and arch-HIV sceptic. Although nearly all scientists with any knowledge of Aids were in no doubt that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause, Professor Duesberg took a contrary view. He and Professor David Rasnick, also of the University of California, were the leaders of the Aids dissidents.

Professor Duesberg argued that the disease was caused by poverty and (illegal) drug-taking, which did so much damage to the immune system as to put it into a state of collapse. The disease was not infectious and was not transmitted by sex. His views had a dramatic impact on Mr Mbeki, who had the medical equivalent of a religious conversion.

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The newly elected President was convinced that the Aids epidemic in Africa was unique and that it demanded a uniquely African solution. Professor Duesberg provided him with the scientific justification he needed for his instinctive response. The baleful consequences for President Mbeki's country are all too plain to see. Millions of children have been infected with the virus, transmitted from their mothers at birth when a single dose of drugs could have prevented it. Millions more adults have been denied the treatment that could have saved their lives.

Mr Mbeki argued that the poverty of his nation and the prevalence of diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis were just as much to blame for the Aids epidemic as HIV itself. He dismissed Aids drugs as not only useless but toxic, a neo-colonialist conspiracy by Western drug companies to force a Western solution on his country.

In 2003 he caused outrage by saying in New York that he did not personally know anyone who had been diagnosed with HIV - this from the leader of a country where, at that time, one in 10 people was HIV positive. Gambia's President, Yahya Jammeh, has been treating HIV victims in the compound of the presidential palace in Banjul with a herbal concoction he claims is a cure. He recently said laboratory tests proved his "medicine" worked. But the laboratory chief denied the claims. What is more worrying still is that it has been the wilfully ignorant policies of Africa's supposedly most developed and progressive state that have allowed him to do so.