15 May 2015
Mail&Guardian
As a young journalist in Johannesburg in the early 1990s, I wrote a story about South Africa’s looming HIV crisis, citing predictions from epidemiologists that, without urgent action, cases could top five million by 2000. That seemed an impossibly large number at the time, but unfortunately those predictions came true.
A combination of government neglect, lack of international preparedness and ground-level stigma allowed Aids to gain a devastating foothold in South Africa. As a result, millions died.
Today, the story is very different.
