UNITED STATES: Jesse Jackson Calls for Investigation into AIDS Drug

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

UNITED STATES: Jesse Jackson Calls for Investigation into AIDS Drug

Associated Press (12.17.04) - Friday, December 17, 2004
Mike Colias

On Thursday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a congressional investigation into reports that US health officials withheld research from the Bush administration showing that nevirapine, which has been distributed to hundreds of thousands of Africans, posed serious risks. Jackson called on the US government to immediately halt the drug's distribution in Africa.

"This was not a thoughtful and reasonable decision, but a crime against humanity," Jackson said at a news conference in a West Side health center in Chicago. "Research standards and drug quality that are unacceptable in the US and other Western countries must never be pushed onto Africa."

AP reported Monday that the National Institutes of Health knew of problems with nevirapine as early as 2002 but did not inform the White House prior to President Bush's launch of a plan to distribute it across Africa. According to documents obtained by AP, Dr. Edmund Tramont, chief of NIH's AIDS Division, rewrote an NIH report on nevirapine to omit negative conclusions. Tramont then ordered the resumption of the research over his staff's objections. An internal review exonerated Tramont of scientific misconduct, said one of his supervisors, Dr. H. Clifford Lane. NIH maintains that allowing nevirapine to be used in single doses to block mother-to-baby transmission has saved hundreds of thousands of African infants from HIV.

Tramont should be fired and prosecuted, said Jackson, and a congressional investigation should determine whether the Bush administration knew the research had been altered. He likened the situation to the US government's 40-year syphilis experiment on impoverished African Americans in Tuskegee, Ala.

State officials, physicians and AIDS activists joined Jackson in denouncing NIH for backing the nevirapine program.
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