Supermodel Naomi Campbell waves to the crowd during the 46664 AIDS charity concert at Ellispark stadium in Johannesburg yesterday. The concert, which coincided with World AIDS Day, is an offshoot of similar shows that have been held in South Africa, Spain and Norway. - REUTERS

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters):

South Africa, which has one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, has made headway in fighting the HIV virus, but condom use is still insufficient, government leaders said yesterday.

One in nine South Africans is infected with HIV, but President Thabo Mbeki's government has been criticised for not doing enough to halt the spread of the disease despite the heavy economic and human toll.

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang cited a study showing a decline in HIV among pregnant women - a benchmark used to measure infection among the broader population.

"The report of the 2006 antenatal survey results released this year showed a decrease in the prevalence of HIV amongst pregnant women who use public health facilities," she was quoted as saying by news agency SAPA.

"It is down to 29.1 per cent in 2006 compared to 30.2 per cent in 2005 ... The decline in the under-20s from 15.9 per cent in 2005 to 13.7 per cent in 2006 in particular suggests a possible reduction in new infections in the population," she said at an event to mark World AIDS Day in the northern Limpopo province.

Mbeki, who has been criticised for not taking the lead in the charge against AIDS, called on South Africans to use condoms.

"What is really of importance is that we must, all of us, take these messages very seriously, particularly our young people," Mbeki said on SABC public radio.

"We don't want our people to be suffering from ill health when they could have handled their own lives in a way that makes for healthy lives."

charity concert

Mbeki's predecessor, Nelson Mandela, staged a star-studded concert expected to be attended by 50,000 in Johannesburg yesterday to raise money for his AIDS charity.

The concert was to include performances from singers Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, and Corinne Bailey Rae and its proceeds will go towards HIV/AIDS programmes throughout southern Africa, the epicentre of the worldwide AIDS epidemic.

The government relented to pressure and launched a plan to provide life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs in 2003, after Mbeki had questioned the safety of the medication and expressed doubts about widely accepted science on the link between HIV and AIDS.

But activists have complained that the programme is moving far too slowly, causing several hundred deaths each day. Some 700,000 HIV patients are without treatment, especially bad in rural areas where clinics are saturated with a backlog of cases.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who took on South Africa's apartheid government as the country's first black bishop and won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said the battle was far from won.

"We face a monumental crisis, one that was horribly exacerbated when we wasted valuable time in futile academic discussions and debates about the causes of AIDS," he said in a speech to diplomats on Friday.

"We were fiddling whilst our Rome was burning. People who would have been alive today died needlessly."