Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated press - Saturday November 24, 2001
Dina Kraft, Associated Press Writer
Maqungo said the drug nevirapine, given to HIV-positive pregnant women during labor to prevent the transmission of the virus to their babies, could have saved her daughter Nomazizi, who spent her nine months of life in and out of hospitals before succumbing to AIDS.
The Pretoria High Court will review Maqungo's testimony Monday when AIDS activists and pediatricians sue the government in an attempt to force it to distribute nevirapine to all HIV-positive pregnant women.
In a country with one of the worst rates of infection in the world, nearly 200 South African babies are born with HIV every day, and studies show nevirapine can reduce that number by nearly 50 percent.
The government has refused to distribute nevirapine nationwide despite an offer by the German-based pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim to distribute the drug for free.
"I'm very angry," said Maqungo, 29, who is now an AIDS activist. "It's very hard to look at an HIV positive child getting sick and dying ... these babies could have been saved by our own government."
AIDS activists and doctors experts have accused the government of not being aggressive enough in handling the epidemic. More than 4.7 million South Africans, 11 percent of the population, are HIV positive, and a recent study found that it was the leading cause of death for adults in the country last year.
Ayanda Ntsaluba, the director-general of South Africa's Health Department, said the government stands by its policy of first distributing nevirapine on a small scale through pilot programs to test its effects.
Ntsaluba said the government's approach is "more cautious" than what is demanded by the Treatment Action Center, the AIDS activist group that filed the law suit.
The government program has "a strong monitoring component, and one that takes a rigorous view of safety issues and effectiveness," Ntsaluba said in a statement.
Treatment Action Center spokesman Pholokgolo Ramothwala dismissed the government's argument, saying pilot programs are not needed for nevirapine, which he said has already been found to be effective.
Ramothwala blames the government foot-dragging on President Thabo Mbeki, who in the past has questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, saying poverty and malnutrition also contribute to the spread of the disease.
Ramothwala said he believes the Health Ministry "has been influenced by Mbeki's thinking on HIV-AIDS, trying to write it off as nothing. The government has options, it just does not want to use them."
The lawsuit claims that by refusing to make nevirapine widely available to HIV-infected pregnant women, the government is denying women and children their constitutional rights to health care.
Maqungo said that she decided to speak out about AIDS after watching her daughter languish in the hospital in the final days of her life, too ill to do anything but sleep.
"I was not open about my (HIV) status but after she died I decided to say something ... to save other children from experiencing the same thing she did," she said.
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