South African Aids activists also want Ms Tshabalala-Msimang to go

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang tells those with HIV to eat garlic and beetroot.

In a letter sent to President Thabo Mbeki, the academics called the government's health policy "disastrous and pseudo-scientific".

"Many people [in South Africa] are dying unnecessarily" because they cannot get Aids drugs, the letter says.

South Africa is one of the countries worst affected by Aids, with some 5.5m people with HIV.

'Embarrassment'

"To have as health minister a person who now has no international respect is an embarrassment to the South African government," say the experts.

They include 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine David Baltimore and Robert Gallo, the developer of the first HIV blood test and co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of Aids.

President Mbeki has so far stood by Ms Tshabalala-Msimang

They declared that Anti-Retroviral drugs (ARVs) were the only medication currently available that could alleviate the consequences of HIV infection.

Three years ago, the government promised to give ARVs to some 380,000 people but so far fewer than half this number are being treated, the letter says.

At last month's international Aids conference in Toronto, United Nations special envoy for Aids in Africa Stephen Lewis said South Africa promoted a "lunatic fringe" attitude to HIV/Aids.

The South African government has said it will change the way its Aids message is communicated.