World Focus: A simple admission in the battle against Aids offers hope to millions

A monumental embroidered triptych called the Keiskamma altarpiece has just gone on display in Southwark Cathedral, in London. Crafted by women in the Eastern Cape, it tells the story of the Aids epidemic in South Africa. The tragic story has just been given a fresh twist.

Barbara Hogan, newly sworn in as South Africa's health minister after the appointment of President Kgalema Motlanthe, addressed an international conference in Cape Town this week.

"We know," she said, "that HIV causes Aids". Scientifically of course, that is 25 years late. It has been known to the global medical community that HIV causes Aids since around 1983. But Ms Hogan also offered blunt criticism of her government's failure "to get ahead of the curve of this epidemic ten years ago" and vowed that everything would now be done to rectify the failures.

South Africa officially admitted the link between HIV and Aids in 2002, and has, since 2006, developed an ambitious treatment plan, with 550 000 people on free anti retro-virals, (ARVs) the drugs that can slow or prevent the onset of full-blown Aids. So why are Aids activists rejoicing?

The slow-paced reality of Aids treatment has been a cause of despair. Exasperated doctors watched patients dying while Ms Hogan's predecessor, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang – Dr Beetroot to her critics – questioned the value of ARVs and promoted the benefits of beetroot, olive oil and garlic in combating the disease.

The policy shift comes too late of course, for many of the 1,000 South Africans who die of Aids every day, and for the thousands of new babies born with HIV because women were denied free mother-to-child prevention drugs until this year.

The crisis remains biblical in scale: 5.4 million people are HIV-positive, half of hospital admissions are Aids-related and 1,000 new infections occur every day. Money, oddly, is not the biggest problem: the health ministry has, according to critics, actually been underspending.

The chief cause for hope could be symbolic. For the first time in years, academics and health professionals feel liberated to say that HIV causes Aids. Already, according to Professor Nicoli Nattrass of Cape Town University health officials are acting aggressively against what she calls "the peddlers of false cures". The next chapter in the South African Aids story has at least the basis for a more hopeful ending.