News Report
October 25, 2000

Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA; Friday, OCTOBER 27, 2000

Johannesburg, South Africa (ANN, October 27, 2000) - The South African government this week announced new guidelines for treating people living with HIV/AIDS.

Speaking at the launch of the guidelines Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said that although the government was still considering the possibility of procuring cheaper HIV/AIDS drugs through parallel imports and compulsory licensing, the department would continue treating patients suffering from opportunistic infections with drugs generally available in clinics and hospitals. The treatment of opportunistic infections, handling mother-to-child transmission (MTCT), HIV/AIDS testing and counselling were among the issues discussed in the new policy approaches for health care workers.

Guidelines on MTCT included information on ways to contain transmission other than treatment with the drugs Nevirapine and AZT. They also included increased intake of Vitamin A for pregnant women as well as specific medical practices during delivery. AIDS directorate chief Dr Nono Simelela said that several African countries have had success with these procedures. Simelela said that due to financial constraints, the government was unable to administer anti-retroviral treatment to everybody. She added that there was also a lack of infrastructure to monitor patients who were taking anti-retroviral drugs. She said that the drugs were not the only option open to patients.

AIDS activists have criticised the guidelines saying that they fail to support anti-retroviral drug use to halt MTCT of HIV. They also criticised the guidelines for treating HIV/AIDS as any other health issue rather than as a national health priority. "The government does not recognise that the key to effective prevention is effective treatment," activist Mark Heywood from the AIDS law project was quoted as saying. "Very few people are taking HIV tests because they feel there is no use as nothing can be done to treat them."

Meanwhile, UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in a joint statement this week called for the general use of anti-retroviral drugs in the fight against MTCT. The two UN agencies said that results from drug trials had shown no unwanted effects and that "regimens which prevent HIV transmission from mother to child warrant their use beyond pilot projects and research settings". "Information currently available does not suggest any adverse effects on the health of the mother, growth and development of infants or the health and mortality of infants infected despite prophylaxis," they said.

Trade Unions lobby for cheaper AIDS drugs

South Africa's giant labour federation the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is to lobby foreign pharmaceutical firms to cut prices of anti-AIDS drugs and will push government to import the drugs more cheaply.

"We cannot allow pharmaceutical companies to continue to profit at the expense of the health, indeed the lives, of the majority of our people," the COSATU executive said in a statement this week. It also voiced its sympathy for the AIDS pressure group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) which recently imported the generic version of the drug fluconazole from Thailand. COSATU said it was "criminal" of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which made the drug used to treat fungal infections and a type of meningitis, to "make a quick buck at the expense of the lives of our people". It once again called on President Thabo Mbeki, who questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, to stop speculating about the causes of the disease and start providing anti-retrovirals freely to HIV pregnant women to prevent infection of their babies.

The University of Natal's psychology department has helped produce a guidebook that teaches children how to cope when they are orphaned by HIV/AIDS. The manual talks about issues such as building self-esteem and helping children cope with emergencies - for example, food shortages - that would normally only be dealt with by adults. The authors were quoted as saying that the purpose of the guide was to build resilience in children who were vulnerable because of HIV/AIDS.

The above article was modified and/or reproduced by the Africa Newswire Network (ANN) courtesy of a news report by the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a UN humanitarian information unit.