CLAIRE KEETON, Pretoria | Friday
SOUTH Africa’s government must provide HIV treatment to pregnant women to help prevent transmission of the Aids-causing virus to their unborn children, the High Court ruled in Pretoria on Friday.
The landmark decision swept aside the official line that such treatment was impracticable, given the scale of the problem in a country where a government survey last year found 25% of pregnant women to be HIV positive.
The government is ”obliged to make Nevirapine (an anti-Aids drug) available to pregnant women with HIV who give birth in the public health sector”, providing their condition allows it, the court ruled.
The case had been brought by a non-governmental organisation, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), in a bid to force the government to provide retro-viral drugs under the public health care system.
”We’ve made history today (…) The judgment brings hope to potentially tens of thousands of women who have HIV,” TAC representative Mark Heywood said after the ruling.
The High Court also ruled that the government must come up, within three months, with a detailed blueprint of how it intends to extend the mother-to-child transmission prevention programme.
Health authorities, who currently only provide the drug on an experimental basis to 18 health centres around the country, had argued that they lacked the resources to distribute the anti-Aids drug to all HIV-positive pregnant women.
An estimated 70 000 to 100 000 babies are infected with HIV every year.
Aids activists from the TAC took the government to court to demand that Nevirapine — which could cut by half the rate of HIV transmission from mothers to babies — be freely distributed to pregnant women carrying the virus.
They argued that current health policies violate constitutional rights including the right to life, dignity and equality.
Despite an offer by the German pharmaceutical firm Boehringer Ingelheim to provide Nevarapine free of charge, the government only distributes the drug at a handful of research sites, reaching about 10% of HIV-infected women.
Health authorities and President Thabo Mbeki have incurred criticism for apparently failing to recognise the magnitude of a problem that could devastate the population according to some medical prognoses.
The overall population is about 44-million.
Responding to the judgement, Dr Haroun Saloojee of the Save Our Babies campaign said an estimated 50 00 lives could be saved next year.
”We’ve been shackled to long by our policy makers,” said Saloojee, who is a paediatrician at Johannesburg’s Coronation Hospital.
”Now we are free to do what we are best trained to do – saving our babies.” – AFP, Sapa