an who made the nation aware of Aids in the early 1980s.
“He was without doubt the first person in the scientific and medical community who tackled Aids head on,” recalls Dr Des Martin, another Aids expert. Dr Francis Venter, president of the HIV Clinicians Society, also paid tribute to Sher as “a man who warned us all that HIV would decimate the country. He was ignored and was tragically proved right”. At a time when almost everyone in the then all-white South African government turned away in complacent silence, Sher warned of a medical “holocaust”. Today, 1000 South Africans are dying every day of diseases related to HIV and Aids.
Shunned first by white nationalist politicians and then by black ANC politicians, this South African Jew went on to warn President Thabo Mbeki about what would happen were not a state-led war against the spread of Aids declared.
Since that ignored warning, the stubborn President has preferred the support of maverick medical practitioners who assert that HIV is a result of colonial-inspired poverty. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has suggested a cure made of beetroot, garlic and African potatoes.
Reuben Sher grew up in a close-knit Jewish family which had known Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe and pogroms led by the czar’s agents and soldiers before that. He fought as a pilot with the Israelis as a young man, before he then devoted himself to medicine.
He first encountered Aids in 1982 by studying the sexual lives of stewards flying with South African Airways. In those days, there were 20 suspected cases – today, a staggering six million.
He started on his long walk to becoming South Africa ‘s “Mr Aids” during a visit to America where he met some of the pioneering virologists at Atlanta ‘s Centre for Disease Control. At that time, only two South Africans were known to have died from Aids-related diseases. Both were gay men and in those days some homophobic church leaders said Aids was spread by homosexuals. Africans called it the “slim disease”.
Reuben Sher knew that while there was no cure for Aids but (like Diana, Princess of Wales ) he suggested that the best treatment was human contact. “I give sufferers a hug,” he famously said not long before his death. “It makes them feel like human beings.”
Friends said he looked like an Old Testament prophet when warning about the new holocaust. And, like many a prophet of old, he was without honour in political circles in his own country.
He is survived by his wife, Jean, three children of his own and a stepchild.
· By TREVOR GRUNDY
Post published in: News