South Africa Just Won’t Give Up When It Comes to Promoting AIDS

Given that South Africa has such a high incidence of AIDS infection, a reasonable person might conclude that the country would try to do everything in its power to reduce the risk of infection. Instead, the government continues to do all it can to prevent pregnant women from having access to a drug that can reduce by up to half the risk of passing on AIDS to their newborn infants.

The drug is nevirapine, and studies show that a single dose taken by women during labor can reduce by up to 50 percent the risk of women passing on AIDS to their newborns. The drug is used throughout the world for this purpose, but South Africa has decided that the drug may be too toxic.

A court earlier this summer ordered South Africa’s government to begin providing nevirapine to pregnant women, but now South Africa’s drug approval agency has said it wants to revisit the issue of whether or not the drug is toxic. The agency cites an FDA study in Uganda, but the FDA concern in that study was over whether or not the researchers carrying out the study had sufficiently documented their findings.

The New York Times noted that, “the council’s deliberations revived serious questions about South Africa’s handling of the AIDS epidemic.” To put it more bluntly, is South Africa seriously interested in stopping its AIDS epidemic? Instead of doing so, it seems focused on making the AIDS crisis the focus of some sort of bizarre internal political exercise. South African president Thabo Mbeki seems intent on allowing infants to contract AIDS simply so that he can assert his country’s independence from the medical consensus on HIV.

Source:

South Africa may bar AIDS drug in childbirth. Rachel L. Swarns, The New York Times, August 5, 2002.

Leave a Reply