When a globally honoured AIDS researcher like Professor James
McIntyre of the Baragwanath Peri Natal Clinic says 100 000 women in
labour have been treated with Nevirapine in the past two years with
no adverse effects and when the World Health Organisation estimates
that this medicine halves mother-to-child transmission then I am
heartened by the simple arithmetic that tells at least 50 000 babies
have been saved. So how can one even contemplate doubling AIDS
related national infant mortality - an estimated 100 infants a day -
as government seems hell bent on de-registering a treatment that even
our Constitutional Court acknowledges is the best resource we have at
the moment. How can our government, born out of a struggle for
justice, strive to ignore the directive of its own court?
How
can our government not acknowledge that Nevirapine is recommended in
dozens of countries in the world, and our own as a safe chronic
medication?
Interestingly, the Medical Control Council is not
questioning the drug's safety for lifelong use as part of triple
therapy in pregnant women and infected children. To quote a health
journalist, all that is being questioned is its use during labour.
How can those who govern us bear to face the reality of human
suffering that accompanies all those who have died and those who are
condemned to certain death because there was and is no treatment for
them - the very treatment that the poor are receiving in other
developing countries?
When our Government refuses a donation
of Nevirapine and places at risk Global Fund monies for our most
infected region, KwaZulu Natal, it must answer to the nation.
When
our Minister of Health continues to question the efficacy of
anti-retrovirals and talks blithely about waiting for the right
structures to be in place she, and those who support her, are
equating the AIDS virus with manageable diseases. If only our health
department could act with the same admirable sense of urgency that
was applied to the meningitis scare in Gauteng? The minister is quite
right when she says the AIDS pandemic is the responsibility of every
government department and I believe it is time her fellow ministers
accepted responsibility for what has become a world disgrace as
serious as apartheid.
The fact that 600 people are dying
daily is a serious indictment on our elected government and leaves
the impression that it doesn't care whether we live or die.
Ends
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