Health-e (Cape Town)
7 May 2009
While South Africans wait with baited breath whether incoming President Jacob Zuma re-appoints Barbara Hogan as health minister, Time magazine included her in their top 100 list of the world's most influential people.
In a piece written by "longtime AIDS activist" and actress Sharon Stone, Hogan is hailed as a person of "profound experience, dedicated service to her homeland, unflinching courage, conviction and compassion". Stone salutes Hogan for "standing up for truth, for what is right and for what must be done".
Reference is made to "Hogan's predecessor (who) recommended garlic and beetroot as treatments for AIDS".
Hogan was appointed as caretaker health minister in October last year when President Kgalema Motlanthe took over the reins from Thabo Mbeki, who had been removed by the ANC.
In Time Hogan finds herself in the company of among others US president Barack Obama, actor and activist Brad Pitt, US first lady Michelle Obama, Golf supremo Tiger Woods, talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, British prime minister Gordon Brown and US senator Edward Kennedy,
Stone's tribute to Hogan appears in the "scientists and thinkers" section:
To understand the dignity and power of Barbara Hogan, one must first have some understanding of what she is made of: profound experience, dedicated service to her homeland, unflinching courage, conviction and compassion.
Hogan, 57, joined the African National Congress (ANC) after the Soweto uprising in 1976, even though the organization had been made illegal. She actively resisted apartheid and organized consumer boycotts, and for this, she served eight years of brutal incarceration in Pretoria Central Prison.
After being released in 1990, she rose through the ranks of the ANC and now has enough power that when President Kgalema Motlanthe appointed her Minister of Health in September 2008, she could engineer a radical change of South Africa's national AIDS policy.
Hogan's predecessor recommended garlic and beetroot as treatments for HIV. But Hogan stands up for truth, for what is right and for what must be done. She has acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS and has embraced antiretroviral drugs. She has pledged that pregnant mothers with the virus will be treated with nevirapine to stop transmission at birth - ending a policy of denial that was responsible for the loss of an estimated 330,000 lives. Not bad for less than one year in office.
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