Dr. Patrick J. Treacy won the coveted GSK Irish Medical Professional Journalist of the Year in 2003 for his column, the Cutting Edge, which was published weekly in the Irish Medical Times. From the late ninties onwards, the column told the untold story of AIDS in Africa, that of medical ignorance, political expediency and lastly a willingness of the South African government under the stewardship of Thabo Mbeki to allow pseudoscience to masquerade as science. It told us how Professor Peter Duisberg, from the University of Berkeley California, who discovered the first oncogene in 1970, started to influence the leader of South Africa to believe that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and that that HIV was not a single disease. In Duesberg’s view, recreational drugs such as nitrite inhalants amongst homosexuals caused the Western form of AIDS and the African type was associated with cofactors such as malnutrition and poverty. In his column, Dr. Treacy respected that Mbeki had a long-term vision about Africa’s Renaissance and he was convinced that poverty was the key factor holding back this advancement. In fact, he wrote " if we are to draw any conclusion about South Africa’s spiral into the depths of this darkest hour, it is Mbeki's willingness to believe that poverty was directly related to the plague enveloping his country and in doing so, deprive his people of life saving drugs that may have halted the diseases progress".
In retrospect, many now consider if Thabo Mbeki could have been convinced of the errors of his ideologies earlier, the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved. South Africa is now entering the “death phase” of the epidemic, as more patients die than there are new infections. The provision of anti retro-viral drugs slows down the dying, give people much more reason than they now have to get themselves tested, and save countless children from being orphaned. This is a tragedy of ignorance that has occurred in our lifetime.
The Cutting Edge also stood firm with the people of Africa after U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, reproached the starving southern African nations at the Johannesburg summit, on the basis that if GM foods were good enough for American to eat, why couldn’t they be good enough for these starving people? Dr. Treacy asked Mr. Powell not be hypocritical as consumers in both Europe and America had their own fears about GM produce, which is the reason that they are willing to go into their local supermarket and pay twice or more to buy organically produced fruits and vegetables. He said that he should be aware that as he tucked into his fillet mingion and lobster tails there are many of his own race that would go to bed hungry that night, simply wishing to eat and not to debate the ethical moralities of altering the plant genome. On the basis of his argument, maybe Mr. Powell should have decided to eat kanunka, chikaanda, or Hopani just because the Tonga, Bemba, and Lozi people respectively eat them. He asked whether African despotic leaders were trying to divert interest away from their blame in the famine, or was this another American ploy to embrace good old-fashioned capitalism in the name of humanitarianism.
