At least 28% of South African schoolgirls are HIV positive compared with 4% of boys because "sugar daddies" are exploiting them, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said.

He said 94,000 schoolgirls also fell pregnant in 2011, and 77,000 had abortions at state facilities, The Sowetan newspaper reports.

About 10% of South Africans are living with HIV, official statistics show.

Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to "high-risk groups", including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]", he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

Much of the media has treated Dr De Cock's admission as a startling revelation. In truth, experts have known for many years that in the vast majority of the world, Aids has little impact on the "general population". In her new book The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani – who worked for 10 years in what she refers to as "the Aids bureaucracy" – admits that by 1998 it was clear that "HIV wasn't going to rage through the billions in the 'general population', and we knew it".