Name a disease and somewhere in the world there are bound to be a group of quacks who think this or that oddball treatment will cure some disease or another. So normally it would not be at all surprising or particularly dismaying that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang believes that people in South Africa can boost their immune systems against AIDS by eating the African sweet potato, hypoxis. Of course what little available evidence there is on hypoxis suggest that, if anything, it is likely to suppress the immune system if eaten in large enough quantities.
Unfortunately, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is not just some nutcase quack (though she definitely is that) — she also happens to be the Health Minister of South Africa. That is right, the country with the most AIDS victims in the world also has as its health minister a quack who claims that rather than anti-retroviral drugs, which South Africans really need to do is just eat more sweet potatoes (and garlic and onions).
In a sign of the times, even in the developing world, the opposition Democratic Alliance has set up a web site devoted solely to Manto’s blunders, Fire Manto that is in a weblog-style format (though with annoying Javascript pop-ups for the content). So you can scroll down and see Manto attributing the AIDS epidemic to God in a way that would make Jerry Falwell proud,
It could be a God-given opportunity for moral and spiritual growth, a time to review our assumption about sin and morality.
Manto is so hostile to anti-retroviral drugs that in 2002 she was angered when a multinational mining company urged its subsidiaries to provide anti-retroviral drugs to workers in countries where the government was unable to do so.
This is a woman who is so far gone that at one point she circulated a memorandum to various South African government officials that featured a chapter from a book claiming that AIDS was part of a conspiracy by extraterrestrials.
Bush’s recent pledge of $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa is a good start, but not if it’s going to end up buying sweet potatoes and helping Manto push this sort of nonsense.