Aids activist Zackie Achmat, who is refusing antiretroviral treatment in protest against the government’s Aids policy, is more valuable alive than dead, the SA Medical Association said on Monday night.
”We issue a heartfelt appeal to Achmat to begin taking lifesaving drugs,” chairman Dr Kgosi Letlape said in a statement.
”You led the profession in the right direction and the only small gesture we can now give you back is to appeal to you to take the treatment and show all South Africans what a difference antiretrovirals can really make.”
Letlape said that would be the most powerful way to challenge claims by some that the drug was poison.
Achmat chairs the Treatment Action Campaign, an Aids lobbyist group that took the government to court to compel it to roll out nevirapine for HIV-positive pregnant women.
Achmat vowed as long ago as 1999 not to take the medicine, saying he could not look other HIV-positive people in the eye if he granted himself a privilege they did not have, Sama said.
Achmat was invited to the Barcelona Aids conference earlier this month but was unable to attend because of his ailing health.
”He could not travel because of an illness which took advantage of his compromised immune system in which his CD4 cell count has dipped dangerously from 275 to 230 this year.
”His doctor’s opinion is that he should by now have begun a course of antiretroviral drugs to bolster his immune system and lower his viral load.”
The government’s policy toward people suffering from HIV amounted to national genocide, Letlape said.
With no treatment in place, South Africans would be reluctant to respond to messages that they be tested for HIV, when all they were rewarded with was massive stigma and potential isolation, he said.
Former president Nelson Mandela met Achmat on Saturday after which Achmat reiterated his stance against receiving treatment. – Sapa