Stephen Lewis, the UN's envoy for AIDS in Africa, who slammed South Africa's "obtuse, dilatory and negligent" response to AIDS in a speech earlier this year, says the government in Pretoria now appeared to have got its act together.
"There is a very major change in government policy on AIDS ... Things have dramatically changed in the last five weeks," he said from Malawi.
"It's very interesting what is happening in South Africa ... Suddenly the government made public statements that it's going to start rolling out treatment more vigorously."
Around 5.5 million of South Afria's population of 47 million are infected with HIV, the second highest rate in the world after India.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has attracted widespread derision for championing beetroot and garlic to combat the disease, with the country's main AIDS lobby, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), demanding her dismissal.
Even before her recent admission to hospital for a lung infection,
President Thabo Mbeki had made his deputy Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka head of a ministerial team on HIV/AIDS and deputy health minister Nozizwe
Madlala-Routledge had increasingly taken on the task of enunciating government policy.
At a recent AIDS workshop, co-hosted by the TAC, Ms Madlala-Routledge struck a markedly conciliatory line by telling delegates that the deputy president had been "tasked" to "unite all of us" for a "common, comprehensive program.
"Government sees you as important partners, as leaders who helped us develop the National Strategic Framework for HIV and AIDS," she said. "We are all in pain ... We are losing our children and youth, our future."
The TAC has long been a virulent critic of the health minister over the government's perceived failure to speed up the rollout of free anti-retroviral drugs but it now appears to have buried the hatchet.
Mr Lewis avoided any direct mention of Ms Tshabalala-Msimang but said that since Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka "had taken over (on AIDS issues) ... she is now the dominant force and dominant voice and those of us who are outside are watching this."
Mr Lewis said the ministry of health "with its previous very controversial policies is no longer the central activity and the deputy president has really taken hold and it's quite interesting what is happening."
Ms Tshabalala-Msimang, derisively dubbed "Dr Beetroot" by critics, came to loggerheads earlier this year with Mr Lewis at the AIDS summit in Toronto, where the South African stall at an exhibition was festooned with garlic and the other vegetables she espouses as remedies.
The government has repeatedly insisted that Ms Tshabalala-Msimang had been misquoted and that she had merely been stressing that good nutrition was also vital in the fight against AIDS.