Thabo Mbeki, the former President of South Africa, contributed to the premature deaths of 365,000 people by his denial of the scientific concensus about the viral cause of Aids, a study by Harvard researchers has claimed.

The study, published in the New York Times, concluded that the South African government would have prevented thousands of poeple from dying earlier this decade if it had provided anti-retroviral drugs to Aids patients.

It blamed the role of Mr Mbeki in refusing to accept the importance of anti-retroviral drugs in treating the fatal disease.

According to UN figures, South Africa today has 5.7 million people - almost one in five adults - who are HIV positive. Over 900 people a day die as a result of AIDS.

But while its neighbours Botswana and Namibia suffered Aids epidemics of a similar scale to South Africa and took action, Mr Mbeki refused to provide his people with the essential medicines to save lives, the report said.

He claimed that, rather than being a viral disease, Aids was caused by malnutrition, and that anti-retroviral drugs were toxic.

He also pushed the view that the concensus opinion of Aids was driven by the powerful vested interests of Western scientists, government and drug companies. He accused them of racism in targeting African countries, it adds.

According to the New York Times, the Harvard researchers quantified the human cost of that inaction by comparing the number of people who got anti-retrovirals in South Africa from 2000 to 2005 with the number the government could have reached had it put in place a workable treatment and prevention programme.

They estimated that, by 2005, South Africa could have been helping half of those in need, but had reached only 23 per cent, compared with Botswana's success in reaching 85 per cent of those in need, and Namibia's in reaching 71 per cent.

Epidemiologists and biostatisticians who reviewed the study said the numbers quoted by the researchers appeared to be sound.

“They have truly used conservative estimates for their calculations, and I would consider their numbers quite reasonable,” James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at Berkeley University's School of Public Health, in California, told the newspaper.

Mr Mbeki stepped down in September after losing a power struggle with his rival Jacob Zuma, who succeeded him as party leader.

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