AEGiS-AP: 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.

Jesse Jackson calls for investigation into AIDS drug

Associated Press - December 17, 2004
Mike Colias, Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a congressional investigation into reports that U.S. health officials withheld research from the White House that showed an AIDS drug distributed to hundreds of thousands of Africans posed serious risks.

He also said the U.S. government should immediately halt the drug's distribution in Africa.

"This was not a thoughtful and reasonable decision, but a crime against humanity," Jackson said Thursday. "Research standards and drug quality that are unacceptable in the U.S. and other Western countries must never be pushed onto Africa."

He likened the drug's distribution in Africa to the U.S. government's 40-year syphilis experiment using poor blacks in Tuskegee, Ala., after World War II.

The Associated Press reported Monday that the National Institutes of Health knew about problems with the drug, nevirapine, as early as 2002, but did not tell the White House before President Bush launched a plan that summer to distribute the drug throughout Africa.

Documents obtained by the AP show that Dr. Edmund C. Tramont, chief of the NIH's AIDS division, rewrote an NIH safety report on nevirapine to omit negative conclusions, and later ordered the research to continue over the objections of his staff.

Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the NIH's No. 2 infectious disease specialist and one of Tramont's bosses, has said an internal review cleared Tramont of scientific misconduct. He said Tramont changed the report because he was more experienced than his safety experts and had an "honest difference of opinion."

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