Leslie London reacts to last week's story on Aids being brought to South Africa during the apartheid period by ANC soldiers

The notion that African National Congress military cadres were responsible for bringing Aids into South Africa ("Soldiers brought Aids to SA", September 3 to 9) was a favourite piece of apartheid misinformation in the late 1980s.

That it now seems to have acquired academic respectability based on Robert Shell's claims at Rhodes University's population research unit is cause for concern. If one wants to find the roots of our epidemic, one need look no further than the system of migrant labour in Southern Africa.

In the late 1980s, the migrant labour system was bringing together tens of thousands of men from countries with HIV rates far in excess of local rates, in an environment of social isolation, ready availability of alcohol and commercial sex, and a small but reliable source of disposable income.

Surveys done by the Chamber of Mines at the time found HIV rates among miners from the Southern Africa region to be between 1% and 5%, and about 0,03% among South African-born miners. Although these were low rates, the fact that HIV was present on our mines before significant movement of ANC, Inkatha or South African Defence Force cadres took place into South Africa makes nonsense of Shell's claims.

If correctly reported, one wonders how a population research unit concerned about understanding the development of the Aids epidemic could ignore the results of the first large-scale epidemiological study into HIV prevalence in South Africa and decide to rely instead on illogical, unproven and unscientific hypotheses. Moreover, as it did for our tuberculosis epidemic (currently among the highest in the world), migrant labour acted as the driving force for the HIV epidemic, multiplying a health problem that thrived on regional and sub-regional migration, and social disruption.

Current estimates on our mines are that about 30% of men are HIV-positive. Is Shell seriously trying to tell us that the current HIV epidemic can be attributed to exactly four HIV-infected askaris sent into Hillbrow by a Civil Co-operation Bureau operative?

To be sure, Aids experts will acknowledge that other forms of migration, such as takes place in the transport industry, and movement of military personnel from high-prevalence areas would help to drive the epidemic. But to claim a single point source of the epidemic located in the infiltration of military personnel in South Africa is just not borne out by existing research.

Attributing a point cause for the HIV epidemic has long been a pastime of politicians, because it is much easier than facing a difficult and complex reality of how the epidemic has been driven in South Africa. That there is now an attempt at cloaking such attribution in academic respectability, from a population research unit, nogal, is just beyond comprehension.

Leslie London, associate professor, department of community health, University of Cape Town; Mark Lurie, senior scientist, Medical Research Council and the Africa Centre for Population Studies and Reproductive Health, Mtubatuba, KwaZulu-Natal; Brian Williams, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, Johannesburg Mail & Guardian

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