Durban - There are some companies and people, including the scientific community, who have been cashing in on the HIV/Aids pandemic, it was claimed at a meeting in Durban on Thursday.
“It has become an industry to some companies: it’s a money-making scheme,” said Kwanele Gumbi, a founding member of the Durban Chamber Foundation, a non-profit organisation and part of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which has designed a series of interventions to help fight the impact of HIV/Aids in the workplace.
HIV/Aids was one of the easiest focus areas to get research funding from donor communities, Gumbi said.
“It has been advancing some people’s academic pursuits - taking their fiefdoms to the next level by having their research papers published,”he said, adding that some research had not advanced the fight against the scourge.
“They go to international conferences and present papers and it does not take us any further forward.”
Gumbi raised the issue at a summit on the impact HIV/Aids had on small, medium and micro-sized businesses (SMMEs).
SMMEs needed employees who did not take off work - because of sickness, while at the same time they needed to receive treatment, Gumbi said.
The summit was called to draw up an action plan.
Eva Marumo, deputy director of the HIV/Aids Cluster with the National Department of Health, said: “We need to start thinking out of the box. We need to focus on prevention more than on treatment. If we are going to continue like this, we are not going to have any more money to buy drugs.”
The American consul general in Durban, Frances Chisholm, said the number one priority of the consulate was to help improve public health in the province.
“As long-term partners with South Africa in the response to HIV, we have come a long way, but the work is far from done.”
She said about 2 000 girls, aged 15-19 years, were being infected with HIV every week, which was a “really scary statistic and a clarion call for action”.
DAILY NEWS