Controversy Overshadows 13th AIDS Conference

D U R B A N, South Africa, July 7 -- The first time they convened, the 33 scientists who are attempting to give South African President Thabo Mbeki the definitive answer on AIDS could not bear to stay inthe same room together.

The panel, made up of roughly even numbers of AIDS“dissidents,” who question the link between HIV and AIDS, andmainstream scientists, who say it has been proved beyond doubt,had to break out into separate sessions.

Now, just days ahead of the 13th International AIDSConference, to be held in Durban, South Africa, mainstreamscientists are struggling to find a way to make Mbeki happywithout giving into the hated dissidents — and without lettingthe controversy overshadow the conference.

They are furious that the first AIDS conference to be heldin a developing country is being hijacked by what they considerto be an inane debate over well-established facts, when it shouldbe an opportunity to highlight the disaster that AIDS has becomein Africa.

Stark Fundamental Differences

“When we met as a panel, we all spent the first day and ahalf working through as much as we could together, but it cameto a point where we were not able to make sufficient progressbecause the fundamental differences were too stark,” Dr. SalimAbdool-Karim, head of the HIV/AIDS Research Unit at SouthAfrica’s Medical Research Council, said in a telephoneinterview.

“There had to be two different groups. The kinds ofsuggestions and recommendations that you make if you don’taccept that HIV causes AIDS are so dramatically different thatthere is no gray area. It is all black and white.”

When Mbeki first started questioning the link between HIVand AIDS, disbelieving scientists turned to their main link —the Internet.

Messages flew fast and furious between South Africa,Britain, the United States and elsewhere. One South Africanresearcher called Mbeki’s questioning attitude “idiotic.”

An outraged John Moore, formerly of the Aaron Diamond AIDSResearch Center at New York’s Rockefeller University and now ofCornell University, sent out lists of Mbeki’s new 33-member AIDSadvisory panel, which included virtually every known“dissident” who disputed the link between HIV and AIDS.