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AIDS campaigner 'probably has tuberculosis'
Jo-Anne Smetherham Cape Times, July 04 2002 . Reprinted courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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Zackie Achmat, the country's best-known HIV/AIDS activist, has suspected tuberculosis. If the diagnosis is confirmed, he will have "stage four", or fully blown, AIDS.
Achmat is refusing to take anti-retroviral drugs that would keep him healthy, despite his doctor's recommendations, because the drugs are not available to poor South Africans with HIV/AIDS, including his colleagues in the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).
"My doctor thinks I have TB," Achmat said on Thursday. "I hope it's not, but it probably is. If so, I will have an illness that defines stage four AIDS, given the weakness of my immune system."
Results of an X-ray had showed TB nodes in his lungs, Achmat said, but the disease still had to be confirmed by a sputum analysis. He would begin a six-month course of TB treatment if he had TB.
"My biggest problem is that I can only work at 30 percent of my usual capacity," Achmat said, coughing as he talked. "But I have not lost my appetite. I am eating a banana as we speak."
The government would probably begin pilot anti-retroviral programmes within a year, Achmat said, because of intense public pressure, in which case he would take the drugs.
"If the government does not do this, it will engender intense social conflict such as this government has never seen. I don't think the government really wants to go that way."
Achmat will be unable to attend the HIV/AIDS Conference in Barcelona, where he was to deliver a plenary address on access to treatment as a basic human right. |
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