AIDS drugs are ‘highly toxic and ineffective’

JOHANNESBURG – The ANC said yesterday that AIDS drugs were ineffective and produced side-effects almost as bad as the disease itself.

The party accused an alliance led by the pharmaceutical industry and including AIDS activists and churches, of trying to force it into dispensing harmful anti-retroviral drugs.

“Government is resisting pressure to provide to all and sundry highly toxic drugs that offer no hope of eradicating the virus,” ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said.

“It will not be stampeded into taking positions that do not improve the health of our people on a sustainable basis,” he said, referring to US research which highlighted the risks of heart disease and cancer associated with the drugs.

Mr Ngonyama called the side-effects “almost as bad as the illness that they are supposed to alleviate”.

But the South African drug industry denied that anti-retroviral drugs were unsafe.

“All medicines, including anti- retrovirals, are registered by drug regulatory bodies around the world as being safe and effective provided they are used as prescribed under medical supervision because it is found that the benefits of those drugs far outweigh any potential side effects,” said Mirryena Deeb, chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of South Africa.

The government has balked on cost and safety grounds at the nationwide use of anti-retroviral AIDS drugs, which slow down the duplication of the virus that leads to full-blown AIDS.

The ANC’s latest attack on the drug industry came weeks after London-based GlaxoSmithKline granted a licence to South African generic producer Aspen Pharmacare to manufacture its AZT, 3TC and Combivir anti-retroviral drugs.

But the success of the scheme, which could drastically cut the cost of these drugs to around R15 a pill, will hinge on whether the government offers a state tender to Aspen for GSK’s products under licence.

Mr Ngonyama, questioning the motives of the industry, said German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim had funded an AIDS activist group that was demanding the use of anti-retrovirals. The company has denied the allegation.

Pretoria is facing a court challenge by the country’s leading AIDS group, the Treatment Action Campaign, for not allowing the drug nevirapine in state hospitals to reduce the risk of mothers passing the virus to newborns.

A senior health official is being sued in the courts by a six-month-old baby who contracted HIV from her mother, on the grounds that health workers failed in their duty to provide proper care. – Reuters