"I hope you have come in such big numbers not just to focus on one ailment but to focus on all of them, because many other people are dying of other diseases in this country," Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told a news conference on the opening day of the conference.

"Even though it is a conference on HIV and AIDS, you must not forget to talk about cancers, you must not forget to talk about diabetes, you must not forget to talk about other communicable diseases," she said.

Tshabalala-Msimang also reiterated her view that anti-retroviral drugs were not the only answer to fighting HIV and that nutrition was a key component in the approach to treatment of the virus, which is the leading cause of death in South Africa, according to its Medical Research Council.

"There is no single clear intervention that can solely solve the challenges of people living with HIV and AIDS," she said.

"I know I get attacked if I say it's nutrition OR micro-nutrients OR anti-retrovirals and people want me to say 'and, and, and'. I think we need to give South African options," she said.

Her comments angered activists from South Africa's top AIDS lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign, which accused the minister of trying to undermine the conference, the second to be held in South Africa since 2003.

"From the beginning, she questioned why we should even have an AIDS conference," said TAC spokesman Mark Haywood, adding that the "hard statistics emanating from her ministry" showed that AIDS was the biggest health crisis facing the nation.

According to the UN AIDS agency, 5.3 million people are living with HIV or full-blown AIDS in South Africa, or an estimated one in five adults.

Haywood said the health minister had missed an opportunity to rally "the country's best doctors, top experts and activists" to a call for united action to fight the disease.

The health minister has been criticised by AIDS activists and health professionals for creating what the Nobel prize-winning organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) has called a "fake polemic" surrounding nutrition and AIDS in South Africa.

Tshabalala-Msimang, who studied medicine in the Soviet Union and in Tanzania, has been advocating her own diet of raw garlic, lemon peel, olive oil and beetroot to fight HIV and openly questioned the use of ARVs, citing the negative side-effects.

The minister again alluded to her own prescription, saying that South Africa was supporting a program to help HIV positive South Africans grow their own vegetable gardens so that they can have "beetroot, garlic, lemon ... and buy a bottle of olive oil. All these things are very critical."

She also said South Africa was blazing a trail in the area of research into traditional medicines and that the government would seek to promote these once testing is completed by medical authorities.

At least 42,000 South Africans are receiving ARVs under the government's rollout program but the TAC is urging the government to speed this up to make them available to 200,000 people by 2006.

Some 4,000 scientists, medical professionals, AIDS activists and social workers are attending the four-day conference in Durban.

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