YAOUNDE, Feb 15 (AFP) - The controversial trial of an AIDS drug on prostitutes, suspended by the Cameroon government, is not dangerous, a US group conducting the trial said Tuesday.
President of Family Health International, Ward Cates, funded by Microsoft head Bill Gates' foundation, said: "There is nothing dangerous about the trial conducted at Douala", the west African country's economic capital.
"We do not do experiments on women, we do not inject participants with the AIDS virus and we don't abandon them," Cates told the state run daily Cameroon Tribune.
Cates said he needed to "correct the rumours" about the trial of the antiretroviral AIDS drug Tenofovir on prostitutes in Douala, which was suspended February 3 by the Cameroon government citing failings in implementation.
Cates met Monday with Cameroon Health Minister Urbain Olanguena Awono.
The clinical trial was to determine whether Tenofovir, a drug sold under the name Viread by the US drug manufacturer Gilead, can prevent the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or AIDS.
The decision to halt the trial followed a report by an audit commission of doctors sent to Douala to study how it was being carried out.
Members of the French branch of the anti-AIDS activist group Act Up demonstrated outside the Cameroon embassy in Paris last month to demand suspension of the Tenofivir test which they said was being conducted under conditions that "run counter to ethical norms."
The United Nations warned last year that AIDS has hit sub-Saharan Africa so badly that it will cast a shadow over generations to come, even in countries that succeed in the battle against it.
Africans account for some 25.4 million of the 39.4 million people around the world who have HIV/AIDS, the UN's World Health Organisation and UNAIDS said in an annual report.
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