Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 26, 2001
The government has maintained that the drug is toxic and that outside of pilot projects testing the use of the drug, there is no capacity to implement a mother-to-child transmission prevention programme.
Gilbert Marcus SC, appearing for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), argued that the government's present policy was irrational, unreasonable and arbitrary, because the programme would only reach about 10% of babies.
This meant that in the next two years, 90,000 babies would simply not be covered by the pilot sites set up by the government in the various provinces.
The policy also meant that doctors in the public sector, however well qualified, were precluded from prescribing and dispensing a potentially life saving drug.
The TAC is seeking a court order to force the Minister of Health and Health MECs to distribute Nevirapine to all HIV-positive pregnant women.
Marcus argued it could not be gainsaid that poverty, race and chance played a role as to which children would live and which would die: "75 to 80% of patients in South Africa are forced by poverty to use the public health system".
"This case is about victims that constitute the most vulnerable sector of our society. The impact on them is nothing short of a tragedy.
"We are seeking to confront a state sanctioned programme which amounts to a conscious choice ... that results in thousands of predictable, yet avoidable deaths of children.
"It flows from the failure by the State to adopt a reasonable programme to reduce the risk of HIV infection to children," he said.
Marcus said most children born with HIV were likely to die before the age of five and that the estimated death toll would be four times the death toll resulting from the attack on the World Trade Center. Those statistics would repeat itself every year, unless the government did something.
He said there was "very real hope" in this gloomy scenario, in the form of Nevirapine, which has been offered to the government free of charge for five years - an offer that has yet to be accepted.
The application continues before Judge Chris Botha.
Sapa
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