Belinda Beresford The Anglican church is moving to save “God’s Babies” with a programme to cut the level of mother-to-child transmission. The move by the church which is increasingly involved in combatting the HIV/Aids epidemic comes at the same time as the news that the government has halted a pilot project to provide an anti-retroviral drug to HIV-positive mothers. The God’s Babies programme, launched by the Johannesburg diocese of the Anglican church, is calling for R500 donations to provide nevirapine and formula milk to HIV-positive pregnant women. Research shows that while antiretroviral drugs such as AZT or nevirapine cut down transmission of HIV from mothers to their children, this changes if the child is breastfed. Many women cannot afford the formula food that will help keep their child safe, let alone the indirect costs involved, such as bottles and sterilising equipment. The treatment with nevirapine requires one pill be given to the mother in labour, and a small dose be given to the infant after birth. One church in Johannesburg managed to raise R70 000 for the God’s Babies programme. At the other end of the spectrum a group of students donated R25 each, combining their resources to get R500. The new initiative will initially be run by volunteers, although co- ordinator Bart Cox hopes business will step in and help with administration costs as the scheme expands. The nevirapine and formula will be distributed through antenatal clinics. The church’s move came as it was revealed that the state’s 18-site pilot programme to offer voluntary counselling and testing to pregnant women, and nevirapine to those carrying HIV, has been put on hold. The pilot scheme, which Department of Health sources have said would affect about 90 000 women a year, has been returned to Cabinet for further approval. Ostensibly a pilot scheme to look at the logistics and to gather scientific information about the use of nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission, it was to have included two sites in each province. Originally the use of anti-retrovirals to cut mother-to-child transmission of HIV was condemned as too expensive by the government, although the manufacturer of nevirapine German-based pharmaceutical multinational Boehringer Ingelheim has offered it to the government free for such use. However, the government has now said it is concerned about safety, particularly in the HI virus resistant to nevirapine. Resistance to one of the 14 anti-retrovirals currently licensed for human use worldwide often means other drugs in the same class (there are three) also become less efficacious.
Such concerns have been dismissed by many in the medical and scientific worlds who say that even those cases where resistance does develop after one dose of the drug, the “wild type” the non-resistance virus becomes dominant again shortly afterwards. There have been suggestions that political, rather than scientific concerns, are holding back the pilot scheme.
Charges by Aids activist Zackie Achmat that the government was killing children by not providing anti-retroviral therapy to HIV-positive pregnant women, led the head of the government’s Aids programme to dissolve into tears on the final day of the Aids in Context conference at the University of the Witwatersrand last week. Struggling with tears as she addressed the conference on the final day, Nono Simelela, the chief director of the HIV/Aids directorate in the Department of Health, said she was powerless to act. “It is unfair to suggest that the fact that a programme to prevent [mother-to-child transmission] is still in the hands of the minister … is because of lack of will. I have visions of myself being lynched by a mob for a decision … I cannot make any promises on behalf of my ministry.”