Deputy Madam Speaker, the Ministers who are here, and Members of Parliament, using all our five senses - hearing, seeing and the rest - it would seem that everybody is lambasting the ANC. However, I know one thing: It is this ANC that took me out of bondage. I had no dignity. My future was not in my hands. To some I was not a doctor; I was a pseudo- doctor, despite my qualifications. But the ANC brought back my dignity. [Applause.]
We will never not have problems - they will always be there. But we must learn to manage them. We don't pray that we will not falter but that we will learn from our mistakes, because as human beings we will always falter. Our future is in our hands, and I want to be mathematical and say that the future, or tomorrow, is a function of today, times yesterday, minus lack of forgiveness.
We are dealing with a virus that is very clever when compared to other viruses. If you look at it, though, it cannot defeat us for it is unicellular and we are multicellular. It is clever in the sense that it first attacks our protectors, which are our white blood cells and our CD4 cells. It actually resides inside the cell, so if you want to kill it, you have to kill the whole cell before you can get into the virus. That is being clever. It uses the nucleus of the human cell to propagate itself; to multiply and survive. That is why I am calling it a very clever virus, but I don't think we'll be defeated by it. I am convinced that we won't be defeated by it, but we need to fight it together, undivided. I do not think that HIV and Aids is something we can use as a political game, trying to fight each other. United, we will definitely defeat it. If not, we will not be able to reach a zero infection rate.
I have seen people in this country being discriminated against because they are HIV positive. They are discriminated against by people who do not understand how HIV attacks an individual, how it causes disease and how it moves from one person to another. People who are discriminated against become depressed. They ultimately succumb, and not just to the virus itself, even though they're infected by the virus. They succumb because when you are depressed, your CD4 count actually goes down. I am sure all of us have noticed that when you are stressed and depressed, you quickly develop a flu-like syndrome. This is what happens when you are immunodeficient too. You find that people succumb and die because you add another stress onto the lowered CD4 count.
Some people die because they develop stress, which emerges in other diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, etc. Others actually kill themselves because of discrimination. They commit suicide.
I would like to urge that we all learn more about the disease and understand it and know how you get HIV and Aids, so that we do not discriminate against people. We need to work hard here. I know there has been talk that people are not testing for HIV and Aids. People are not testing because they are afraid of the stigma that you get labelled with if you are HIV positive. If we do away with the stigma, we would definitely get to zero deaths.
I commend the ANC, the government and the Department of Health for the decision they took to treat people with a CD4 count of 350 and below with antiretrovirals. Whatever the situation - whether it is men having sex with men or whatever - if you get antiretrovirals, your viral load goes to zero. If your viral load goes to zero, then you are not going to infect the other person. Definitely, this strategy is a very important step. They will not infect others and the prevalence will actually go down. We might get a situation where we will have a zero infection rate after this ARV treatment strategy. Opportunistic infections will not set in and obviously you will not have death after that. What kills people are the opportunistic infections.
Good as it is, this decision and the intentions of government, led by the ANC, will fall flat if we are not going to correct the inequities and asymmetries that we have in South Africa, such as the two health systems. We have health for the moneyed and health for the poor. We have to achieve universal coverage for everybody in South Africa. If we do not do that, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve.
Let me give an example. You might find a person who is working in one of the better-resourced provinces or the richer provinces, has medical aid and is going to receive treatment because of that. When that person goes home for the holidays in December, there is not going to be a place where he can get proper treatment. Guess what is going to happen. That person is not going to take his treatment because facilities there are not as good as where he comes from. The next thing is that he will develop resistance.
I think South Africa is one of the countries with extreme resistant TB solely because of these inequities and asymmetries. Some people take their treatment when they are in the big towns. Sometimes, when you take treatment, you are told that your medical aid is exhausted. So you have to go to a public institution. When that happens, there can be no doubt that resistance will follow because somebody might actually change the treatment.
A third reason would be that some people might not accept that they are HIV positive and start looking for other doctors who are going to tell them that they are HIV negative, despite the treatment that has already been given. Obviously, that person is going to stop the treatment that he has already gotten.
What I am trying to say here is that we might have viruses that develop resistance. We need to make sure that we work around universal medical coverage so that, whether I live in Johannesburg or Cape Town, it would be easy for anybody to know what treatment I have been getting, and even what my diagnosis is, when I go to the Eastern Cape, for example.
Without the IT connections of a medical system that offers universal coverage, we might as well forget about this succeeding. The NHI that we are talking about is something that should have been done yesterday. It should not be something that we are still talking about. We should have done it. [Interjections.] The reason we are so unhealthy in South Africa is because of the asymmetries and inequities that we have.
There is something I mentioned earlier, when I said the future is about today, times yesterday, minus lack of forgiveness. Even when we work on giving therapy to all, it is only going to be preventive. I am convinced that with the passion that has been shown by the leadership of the ANC, the SA National Aids Council, Sanac, and the Department of Health, we are going to be able to reach zero infections, especially if we work towards universal coverage. Deaths are not going to occur from HIV/Aids, but from something else.
If only we can unite against this unicellular organism and improve our primary health care through universal coverage for everybody. We need to understand the disease, how it occurs and how to prevent it on the primary health care level. In that way we will not continue discriminating against people unnecessarily, sending them into depression. When people become depressed, lowers their immunity, and when that happens they die. The future is in our hands. It depends on us. The bondage that we had is a thing of the past because of the ANC.