Premier positive about AIDS conference results

he premier of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province, Lionel Mtshali, has urged the public to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic "as if they were engaged in a war". Speaking in the port city of Durban during a recent three-day conference to devise strategies for hastening the government's provision of antiretrovirals, the premier said people were dying in their thousands. Mtshali was quoted by a local newspaper, The Mercury, as saying: "We are at war because the damage that HIV and AIDS is imposing on the social and economic fibre of our society can only be equated to that of war." The premier said he was hopeful that an integrated response, charting the way for the implementation of prevention, treatment, care and social mobilisation could emerge from the conference.