(Adds quotes from opening session, background) By Paul Simao DURBAN, June 5 (Reuters) - South Africa's controversial health minister has withdrawn from a major AIDS conference because organisers did not give her a prominent place in the programme, the deputy president said on Tuesday. "The minister withdrew from the programme because of the place you put her in the programme," deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said of minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. She made the comments in a speech at the opening session of the country's third AIDS conference in Durban, criticising organisers for placing the minister on the event's sidelines. Tshabalala-Msimang was not included in the opening ceremony on Tuesday evening but had been scheduled to speak in a session on Wednesday alongside AIDS activists and researchers. She has been a pivotal figure in South Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis since becoming health minister in 1999, engaging in bitter debates with AIDS activists and at times appearing to question accepted HIV science. Tshabalala-Msimang drew international condemnation at last year's world AIDS conference in Toronto for promoting garlic and beetroot as treatments for HIV. The president's office said on Tuesday she would resume her post on Wednesday after recovering from a liver transplant operation, the SAPA news agency reported. SHIFT IN ATTITUDE? The conference has drawn AIDS researchers from around the world amid tentative signs South Africa is finally embracing mainstream approaches to fighting the epidemic. Hopes of a shift in South Africa's attitude to a disease affecting nearly 12 percent of its 47 million people have been building since the government in March unveiled a revamped AIDS strategy, including an expanded rollout of life-saving drugs. Anti-retroviral (ARV) medications are credited with drastically reducing AIDS deaths and are now widely accepted as the frontline treatment for HIV/AIDS. But the South African government was a late and reluctant convert to the ARV camp -- experts say it wasted years and lives questioning the drugs' efficacy and safety, and soliciting the views of dissident scientists who opposed their use.President Thabo Mbeki's administration has now changed course, making ARVs a pillar of its new National Strategic Plan to fight HIV/AIDS. It envisions a five-fold increase in the number of HIV-positive people accessing the drugs by 2011. More than five million South Africans are infected with HIV and 1,000 die each day from the disease. In a speech in the opening session, Peter Tiot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), praised South Africa for revamping its AIDS strategy. But he also noted that slow progress on halting mother-to-child transmissions of AIDS, violence against women, and drug resistant tuberculosis could undermine the battle against the disease in one of its epicentres. "If we don't integrate TB control into all programmes we are doomed to fail," he said. "You have a better chance than any other country in the region to deliver on AIDS. If you can't then who will?"
