Winning Over Africa On AIDS

By ERIC POOLEY

His health-care overhaul went nowhere, but former President Bill Clinton is having more success in the humanitarian realm. He announced an ambitious program last week to help developing countries clear two major obstacles in fighting AIDS: the high cost of antiretroviral drugs and the low quality of their own health-care systems. His foundation has enlisted four drug companies, which will offer AIDS-fighting drugs at one-third the usual price. Four African countries and more than a dozen in the Caribbean region have signed on for the program so far.

A big surprise is that one of those countries is South Africa--whose president, Thabo Mbeki, has resisted developing a national plan to provide antiretroviral drugs and has even questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. What changed his mind? "You can only stay in denial so long," Clinton told TIME. "He was exposed to two articles by people--I'm ashamed to say they were Americans--who said HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and the medicine could kill you. He also had a legitimate issue: South Africa had given out anti-TB medicine without a proper protocol and they wound up spawning some more virulent, drug-resistant strains." But by the time Clinton was in Johannesburg in July for Nelson Mandela's 85th birthday, Mbeki had come around. "He said, 'You'll promise me these drugs will be administered with the same high quality that the [National Institutes of Health] would use in America?' I said, 'I give you my word.' He said, 'O.K., I'll do it.'"

--By Eric Pooley