Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

South Africa had the highest prevalence of HIV in the world and he assumed that its government would be desperate to find a solution and a treatment. He expected open arms and he got a fist instead. Because this was the time of Comrade Undertaker and Doctor Beetroot. Comrade Undertaker was President Thabo Mbeki. “Comrade” because of his stern demeanor and the Communist leanings of the African National Congress (ANC), the governing party of South Africa, and “Undertaker” because Harvard academics have calculated that Mbeki’s refusal to believe that HIV caused AIDS and to provide antiretrovirals has led to the deaths of at least three hundred thousand South Africans. Doctor Beetroot was Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Mbeki’s health minister, a woman who told South Africans dying in their hundreds of thousands—including the president’s spokesperson—that antiretrovirals were toxic and that they would do better to treat HIV with diet. At the huge AIDS conference in Durban in 2000, the government stall displayed beetroot, garlic, and African potatoes because this is what Tshabalala-Msimang proposed to treat HIV. It was a shock. Mbeki as vice president had shown no signs that he believed HIV was not related to AIDS, or that ARVs were toxic, or that AIDS was nothing more than a disease of poverty. In 1999 he became president, and—so the tale goes—was on the Internet late one night and found a quack denialist site and made it truth. The government began to support the use of multivi...