AEGiS-DMG: Gazi offers to pay for HIV drugs: Eastern Cape state doctor, Costa Gazi, has challenged the government's Aids strategy by offering to pay for HIV drugs himself after the Dept of Health's failure to supply them to community clinics

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Gazi offers to pay for HIV drugs: Eastern Cape state doctor, Costa Gazi, has challenged the government's Aids strategy by offering to pay for HIV drugs himself after the Dept of Health's failure to supply them to community clinics

Daily Mail & Guardian - Johannesburg, South Africa. March 29 2000
Peter Dickson

COSTA Gazi, the outspoken Eastern Cape state doctor, has offered to personally fund the introduction of Nevirapine, an anti-retroviral drug used to combat Aids, in community clinics if the Department of Health fails to provide the drug.

Gazi, the health secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, said this week he is prepared to use his own money to fund the drug in the 20 community clinics in the Eastern Cape under his supervision. Gazi is the head of public health at Mdantsane's Cecilia Makiwane hospital.

The offer by the controversial doctor is the latest in a series of high profile challenges to the government over its Aids strategy. Last week Gazi announced he intended launching a class action against the health ministry for its failure to provide the anti-retroviral drug AZT in state hospitals.

"I will be personally financing the drug if my authority doesn't," Gazi said this week. "I will also be asking the mothers to make a contribution if they can, until the state wakes up and does its duty."

Nevirapine costs R24 for a single dose course for the mother at the time of labour and a "fraction of this" for each child, he says, compared with between R200 and R400 for AZT courses. A single dose of Nevirapine significantly reduces the transmission of Aids to infants by HIV-positive mothers, Gazi says, adding that his clinics treat about 350 HIV-positive pregnant women monthly.

Two months ago Gazi was fined R1 000, half of which is suspended on condition the offence is not repeated in the next six months, by a provincial health disciplinary committee, for bringing former health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma into disrepute. Gazi had called for manslaughter charges against Dlamini-Zuma last April for her refusal to commit the distribution of AZT to state hospitals, saying the right to life of thousands of babies was being denied.

The controversy catapulted Gazi into the headlines and he used his outspoken position to spearhead a watchdog Aids group, the Shadow National Aids Council, which plans to dog every move of the state's advisory National Aids Council.

Asked if his new direction, in the light of his fine, would land him in more trouble, Gazi laughed and said: "Trouble? Get into trouble? I love getting into trouble -- it's my middle name."

The son of Greek shopkeepers from Krugersdorp -- he changed his name from Gazidis to Gazi (a Xhosa clan name literally meaning blood) two years ago because it was "difficult for people to remember" -- he has never been far from controversy.

He initially studied engineering -- until a friend gave him a copy of Karl Marx's banned Communist Manifesto in 1954. It was, he says, his "road to Damascus" and he gave up engineering for medicine.

"I typed it out seven times on my new typewriter. It was mind- blowing -- no poverty, no more exploitation. The good for all was the basis of the good for each. It left an indelible mark on my brain."

Gazi was recruited by the South African Communist Party in Durban and returned to Johannesburg as a medical officer at West Rand Consolidated Mines. A year later, expecting to start work as a surgical intern in Soweto, health authorities told him they had "made a mistake".

He stood unsuccessfully as an election candidate in 1994, a year after being stabbed by a young PAC member at the unveiling in Umtata of a tombstone for five children killed in a South African Defence Force attack on a suspected Azanian People's Liberation Army base.

Gazi says it was a "purely racist attack because I was white" and that he did not want the youth charged "because I thought it would give the PAC bad publicity". The youth's branch secretary, however, called the police and the youth was jailed for five years.
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