We wanted to keep Zuma out of it, says AIDS doctor

We wanted to keep Zuma out of it, says AIDS doctor

Sunday Times, South Africa - Sunday, March 14, 1999
Laurice Taitz

RESEARCHERS who have claimed a major AIDS breakthrough this week defended their decision not to inform Dr Nkosazana Zuma, the Minister of Health, before going public, saying they did not want to be seen to be enlisting her support.

Medunsa Professor Wim du Plooy said it would have been "unethical" for them to go straight to Zuma.

He said his team did not want to be seen to be making the same mistake as the researchers into the controversial drug Virodene, who first went to Zuma, making it appear as if they wanted her to back their work into what was claimed to be a cure for AIDS.

He also defended their decision to make preliminary results public although research was still at an early stage. "Our priority is our patients. They know we wouldn't say it if we didn't believe in it."

Du Plooy and Dr Andries Lategan of Medunsa, specialists in the field of immunopharmacology, announced on Thursday that they had made a breakthrough in the treatment of HIV in the first phase of the clinical trials of the drug Inactivin, developed by Irish company Colthurst.

Du Plooy said their results were sent for review to three experts in the field before the announcement was made.

But AIDS activists criticised the pair, accusing them of raising false hope among sufferers.

However, Lategan said: "I want to stress this is a treatment for the disease, and not a cure."

In the first phase of the trials, which began in August, a small group of men with HIV were given doses of the natural steroid Inactivin over five days.

A second group was given larger doses in November. In both tests the patients had an increase in their counts for CD4 - the white blood cells that co-ordinate the body's immune response and are attacked by the virus - and the HIV present in white blood cells decreased to almost zero. The drug stops HIV from replicating in white cells, where it passes on its RNA, allowing the body to produce healthy cells.
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