South Africa announced ambitious new plans on Tuesday for earlier and expanded treatment for HIV-positive babies and pregnant women, a change that could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the nation hardest hit by the virus that causes HIV/Aids, says the Mail & Guardian.

President Jacob Zuma — once ridiculed for saying a shower could prevent HIV/Aids — was cheered as he outlined the measures on World Aids Day. The new policy marks a dramatic shift from former

President Thabo Mbeki, whose health minister distrusted drugs developed to keep Aids patients alive and instead promoted garlic and beetroot treatments. Those policies led to more than 300 000 premature deaths, a Harvard study concluded.

The changes are in line with new guidelines issued a day earlier by the World Health Organisation that call for HIV-infected pregnant women to be given drugs earlier and while breast-feeding.

By treating all HIV-infected babies, survival rates should also improve for the youngest citizens in South Africa, one of only 12 countries where child mortality has worsened since 1990, in part due to Aids.

Zuma compared the fight against HIV, which infects one in 10 South Africans, to the decades-long struggle against the apartheid government.

“At another moment in our history, in another context, the liberation movement observed that the time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight,” Zuma
said. “That time has now come in our struggle to overcome Aids. Let us declare now, as we declared then, that we shall not submit.”

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