The Political management of HIV and AIDS in South Africa: one burden too many?

AIDS is killing South Africans at a rate equivalent to one September 11th attack every three days. Yet the government seems intent on proffering quixotic solutions to a problem that it downplays. This book is an enquiry into the public policy response to the South African AIDS epidemic. Since AIDS first appeared in the country in 1982 there have been numerous good policy documents written by successive South African governments - yet the epidemic shows little signs of abating. The AIDS policy environment has become so contested that the courts are increasingly called upon to intervene between a government and a civil society that seem to be at war with one another. This book reviews the responses of the National Party and the Mandela and Mbeki governments to the growing epidemic and concludes that, unless public policy-makers address the ostensibly 'undiscussible' structural drivers of the AIDS epidemic, South Africans will continue to suffer the ravages of it.