BY DR COSTA GAZI
[The following statement was written on behalf of the AIDS Babies Battling AIDS (ABBA) Trust by Dr Costa Gazi, the outspoken critic of South Africa's African National Congress government's policy of refusing to supply anti-retroviral drugs to South Africa's HIV/AIDS sufferers. It was issued on March 5 in response to the Pretoria's defence of its health laws from a legal attack by the multinational pharmaceutical companies. It has been slightly abridged.]
The ABBA Trust is pleased to note that the government is now determined to get the price of anti-retroviral drugs reduced. But we also note that there is a lack of urgency on its part to use these weapons against the spreading HIV/AIDS epidemic.
To give all pregnant mothers access to nevirapine after counselling and testing is a very cost-effective and life-saving service. Nevirapine [has been] given free [to the South African government by a big drug company] for this purpose and yet the government hesitates and only introduces a few projects to cover a mere 5% of pregnancies. Nothing is made available for raped women, the HIV+ mothers are not helped to stay alive and none of the 4 million HIV+ people have public access to therapy.
The government has pleaded over and over again that it cannot afford the drugs. It has never told us what it can afford. Yet it can afford to service and pay back the odious apartheid debt — tens of billions of rands — and it has earmarked R43 billion to buy arms in a series of dodgy arms deals. The cost of saving 30,000 babies from the infection is less than R50 million a year.
The current court case instituted by the predatory drug corporations is aimed at legislation that was proposed four years ago. It is obvious that the case will drag on and on for more years. This suits the drug companies and the government. The companies protect their patent rights and the government saves money — in line with its macroeconomic policy which calls for cuts in public health expenditure.
A determined and concerned government that cares about the poor would have invoked [provisions in World Trade Organisation's Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights] agreement and provided the needed drugs. This gives governments the power to provide drugs at acceptable prices in the face of a "dire emergency". This is done by over-riding patent rights temporarily to allow local production of the drugs and also to import the drugs from countries where they are being sold at a lower price.
Our government is too timid to use this power and prefers the slower process of going through the courts. Even when the case is finished, the Health Department has given no undertaking that it will introduce any of these drugs to treat those with the infection.
Every day of delay costs lives — 100 babies every single day will continue to die unnecessarily — but the slow wheels of the judicial system will now be blamed for the government's tardiness.
The ABBA Trust does not believe that there is any excuse for not making the anti-retroviral drugs readily available in the public health sector. The cost of delay is mounting every day — even the business sector is being damaged to the tune of billions of rands — and the amount of suffering that could be prevented is astronomical. By all means let the government lock horns with the powerful drug cartels — but in the meantime it can afford to save lives.
Let the spin-doctors spin. The reality is that affordable drugs are readily available and the ANC government just twiddles its thumbs and makes excuses.
[Dr Costa Gazi is head of public health at Cecilia Makewane Hospital in Mdantsane, East London, and is also Pan Africanist Congress secretary of public health. In defiance of provincial health authorities, Gazi has purchased supplies of the anti-HIV drug nevirapine, using his own salary, to be administered to pregnant women and rape victims at his clinic.]