Health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang yesterday unveiled the South African exhibition stand before the start of the International Aids Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

Her ministry said in a statement the exhibition demonstrated the work that South Africans, both in and outside government, had done to respond to the challenges posed by HIV and Aids.

In an address, Tshabalala-Msimang emphasised the importance of this conference to South Africa.

"The area that we will be focusing on during this conference is prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.

"As a country, we tried to interrogate the use of nevirapine as a monotherapy to mothers and babies. However due to pressure from some civil society organisations, our court ruled that we needed to extend the provision of this drug beyond the research programme that we had."

The challenges around infant feeding had also not been resolved.

"We invested on providing infant formula for this programme, however the recent findings are supportive of the breast-feeding option. We hope that this conference will provide sufficient data to enable us to reflect appropriately on these matters.

"We will soon convene a national consultative meeting to discuss the outcomes of this conference in relation to our PMTCT programme," Tshabalala-Msimang said.

She also noted the recent announcement by the Actuarial Association of South Africa that the number of people with HIV in the country was about 33% less than what the researchers thought.

"I must say that we have always been concerned about how the previous figures were calculated. The researchers have come to this new conclusion because for the first time, they have taken into account the impact of our interventions including prevention and treatment," said Tshabalala-Msimang. – Sapa.