JOHANNESBURG - More than 80 international scientists, including a Nobel laureate, have appealed to South Africa's president to fire his controversial health minister for what they say are "pseudo-scientific" policies on AIDS.

South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang addresses a news conference in this Oct. 2000 file photo. More than 80 international scientists and academics condemned South Africa's AIDS policies as ineffective and immoral and called for the firing of Tshabalala-Msimang in a letter to President Thabo Mbeki released Wednesday Sept. 6, 2006. [Reuters]

Calls for the dismissal of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for promoting alternative treatments have grown since last month's global AIDS conference in Toronto.

Experts have criticised President Thabo Mbeki's government for underplaying anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs and promoting home-grown AIDS treatments such as garlic, beetroot and lemon at the conference.

"To have as health minister a person who now has no international respect is an embarrassment to the South African government," said the letter, dated September 4.

"We therefore call ... for an end to the disastrous, pseudo-scientific policies that have characterised the South African government's response to HIV/AIDS."

South Africa is the centre of Africa's AIDS pandemic with some 5.4 million HIV/AIDS cases.

A government AIDS plan launched in 2003 promised to treat 380,000 people by now, but it has only achieved half of the target, said the letter, which appeared on an AIDS activists' Web site www.aidstruth.org/letter-to-mbeki.php

"Many people are therefore dying unnecessarily," it said.

Among the letter's 82 signatories are David Baltimore, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1975, and Robert Gallo, who co-discovered that the HIV virus was the cause of AIDS.

Mbeki's spokesman confirmed the scientists' letter had been received by the president's office, but said Mbeki may not have read it since he has been busy this week with the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The government says it has one of the biggest ARV drug treatment programmes in the world but also insists nutrition and traditional medicine must be an integral part of the plan to treat HIV/AIDS.

But the scientists said they were worried about unproven remedies for AIDS being marketed in South Africa, some which have the implicit or explicit support of the health minister.

"We condemn all those who profit from this type of quackery, at the expense of the sick and dying," the letter said.

A new study last month said South Africa faced close to 9 million new HIV cases by 2025 if the crisis was not contained.

Zachie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign, which launched protests against the health minister last month, welcomed the letter.

"This gives our president the opportunity to unite the whole country (on the AIDS crisis) and deal with the biggest obstacle to that unity, which is the health minister," he told Reuters.