JOHANNESBURG - A South African pathologist faces a disciplinary hearing Thursday for attributing AIDS as the cause of death on a medical certificate in the first ever case of its kind in the country. Leon Wagner from South Africa’s central Free State agricultural heartland will appear before the South African Health Professions Council in Bloemfontein over a death certificate he had signed after the demise of a young woman in April 2005.Wagner told AFP that he examined the 30-year-old woman’s ‘corpse and it was typical of a person suffering of AIDS’. ‘I have done such certificates thousands of times,’ he said, adding that ‘everything was done according to the letter of the law.’
| This is South Africa, where the 'letter of the law' seems to be increasingly mis-spelled. |
Around 5.5 million of South AfricaÂ’s 47 million people are infected with HIV, the second highest rate in the world after India. There is still a degree of stigma attached to AIDS and the families of victims often try to fudge the cause of prolonged illness or death. South African statisticians have said that doctors were generally loathe to attribute AIDS as the cause of death, making it difficult for them to compile the number of AIDS-related mortalities.
The Solidarity labour union said in a statement that ‘the hearing can be a watershed for South Africa’. ‘If he is exonerated and it is found that doctors may in future indicate AIDS as the real cause of death on certificates, it would have tremendous consequences for the statistical documentation of this pandemic,’ Solidarity spokesman Dirk Hermann said.