South Africa's cabinet, bowing to public calls for more aggressive measures to fight the AIDS pandemic, says it aims to draw up a plan for distributing anti-retroviral drugs by the end of September.
"Government shares the impatience of many South Africans on the need to strengthen the nation's armoury in the fight against AIDS," the cabinet said in a statement on Friday after meeting to assess the financial viability of a national drug plan.
The move signals an important official change in South Africa's approach to AIDS, which infects an estimated 4.7 million people in the country - the highest caseload in the world.
President Thabo Mbeki has been criticised for playing down the pandemic's severity, and his health minister has questioned the viability of anti-retroviral treatment here, saying the drugs are unproven, potentially toxic and too expensive.
The result has been that anti-retrovirals - the only drugs known to be effective against the disease - are available almost exclusively to those who can afford private treatment.
The cabinet cautioned that "if and when" a decision to introduce a national drug programme is made, it could take up to nine months for the medication to reach the estimated 500,000 South Africans who need it.
And it said questions remained about the implementation of such a programme, including the availability of the drugs, the sustainability of financing and the development of a health care infrastructure capable of delivering treatment.
But it said the government now accepted that public anti-retroviral treatment should be part of South Africa's response to a disease seen as a growing threat to economic and social stability.