Aids campaigner 'danced all morning'

Zackie Achmat (left) has fought hard for treatment for all

South Africa's best-known Aids activist Zackie Achmat tells the BBC of his reaction after years of campaigning to the government's historic decision to distribute free Aids drugs to all HIV-positive South Africans.

I danced the whole morning. I am a black man without rhythm so it was very difficult for me. It really is an enormous victory.

We want to salute the courage of the cabinet.

We have in South Africa at the moment 600 people every day who die of Aids-related illnesses. We also have 1,500 new infections every day.

Those are all things which could have been prevented or at least the impact mitigated.

The tragedy of what has happened is that not every sand in the Sahara desert could carry the burden of poor people on our continent. Not every drop of water in the Nile river could carry the tears of the people.

But there is enormous hope now for millions of people on our continent.

Urgent prudence

This is going to be the largest single public health intervention the world has ever seen.

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It is important that we move slowly in the beginning so we can scale up very rapidly as soon as the key lessons are learnt.

We have to have urgency and prudence. We know we have the hardest work ahead of us: That is to make sure as many people get treated as quickly as possible.

I think the consequences of the epidemic on our society makes it impossible not to treat people. Morally and economically and socially it is the right thing to do.

New chance

From a public health perspective it is even more important because fewer than 10% of the 5.3m people living with HIV in South Africa know they are positive.

People don't come forward because they don't want to find out they have a life threatening disease and receive no treatment.

We have shown that in any public health emergency if there is treatment then people come forward to be tested if there isn't treatment they do not and you have a silent epidemic.

I believe that combining treatment, prevention and care in this way gives us a new opportunity to start rolling back the new infections which is critical.

I don't believe it is moral, lawful or constitutional to allow millions of people to die to show others what happens to people who have sex.