THE South African Health Minister has reignited the country’s fierce debate over Aids by attacking the World Health Organisation (WHO) and again emphasising the benefits of olive oil, garlic and beetroot in fighting the condition.

“Raw garlic and skin of a lemon — not only do they give you a beautiful face, but they also protect you from the disease,” Manto Tshabala-Msimang told a parliamentary committee.

South Africa has the world’s highest caseload of HIV infections with one in nine of its 45 million population estimated to be carrying the virus. But the minister — dubbed Dr Garlic for previous claims that nutrition can play a role in fighting the pandemic — said that she would continue to warn patients about the side-effects of anti-retroviral drugs.

“Nobody will stop me from doing that. It’s correct and proper,” she said. “As a country we really have been vindicated in this regard. We are what we eat, and we are what we drink.”

She said that she would not be “pressured” by the WHO, which she accused of not consulting South Africa over its “3 by 5” campaign to put three million in Africa, Asia and Latin America on anti-retroviral drugs by 2005 — a goal which has no chance now of being realised. “They set that target . . . we were not part of the decision on that target,” she said. “And now that target won’t be met, they want to make South Africa the scapegoat.”

Aids activists condemned her remarks which echoed comments by President Mbeki, who first ignited the controversy some years ago by questioning the link between HIV and Aids and pouring scorn on statistics, saying that he did not know anyone who had died of the condition.

“What a shame that instead of providing leadership, the minister wastes her time with these sort of debates,” said a spokesperson for the Treatment Action Campaign, the South African activist group that is leading a campaign for more access for Aids sufferers to anti-retrovirals. At present only about 42,000 South Africans are receiving publicly funded Aids drugs.

The minister told last year’s Aids summit in Indonesia that even the WHO had found that nutrition played an important role in holding the condition at bay. She said that the anti-retroviral rollout was not about chasing numbers, but about the quality of healthcare.

“South Africa is playing its part within the resources available to it . . . Just because Africa has fewer resources does not mean regulatory precautions should be ignored,” she said.

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