South African Province Goes It Alone on AIDS Therapy
Originally published by Reuters, July 18, 2002
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (Reuters) — One of South Africa's nine provinces has by-passed the national government's policy to launch a pilot programme to treat people living with HIV and AIDS using drugs the state has branded unsafe.
Western Cape province Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk visited the squalid Gugulethu shantytown clinic to announce the project and challenged Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to fall in with the growing national consensus on how to fight the disease.
"This is a first modest step in moving from focusing only on prevention to the treatment of people living with AIDS," he said.
Patients clutching tattered medical files said they had waited since 4:30 in the morning, hoping to see a physician, but officials said the clinic could do no more for those with AIDS than treat the opportunistic infections that may have occurred.
South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, an estimated 4.74 million people. The state's Medical Research Council has warned that up to seven million people could die of AIDS by 2010 if the state does not act.
Van Schalkwyk pulled out of a coalition with the opposition Democratic Alliance last year and led his New National Party (NNP), which built and then dismantled apartheid, into a loose accord with the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Now premier of the country's second-richest province and leader of an NNP-ANC provincial coalition, he has thrown his weight behind most ANC policies, but remains critical on some, including the campaign against AIDS.
Tshabalala-Msimang has said that the antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS are too dangerous and too expensive to prescribe in state hospitals. She fought all the way to the Constitutional Court to avoid being forced to offer drug therapy to all HIV-positive pregnant women that has been shown to reduce the risk of vertical transmission.
The court has ordered the government to implement mother-to-child prevention programmes wherever possible, without delay.
In a statement in April, President Thabo Mbeki's cabinet reversed its blanket opposition to antiretroviral drugs and said it would accelerate their use to limit mother-to-child infection. Without acknowledging that HIV causes AIDS, a widely accepted link that Mbeki has questioned, the cabinet said it would act "on the premise" that the two are linked.
Van Schalkwyk said his provincial government and the British charity Crusaid would co-fund a programme in which South African physicians and support staff would give antiretroviral therapy to 150 adults and children living with HIV/AIDS.
