JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – President Thabo Mbeki’s ruling party published a stinging attack Friday on top U.S. health officials, accusing them of treating Africans like “guinea pigs” and lying to promote a key AIDS drug.
The criticism reinforces fears of doctors and activists that new questions about the testing of nevirapine could halt use of the drug that’s credited with protecting thousands of African babies from catching HIV from their mothers.
The article, published in the online journal ANC Today, was responding to Associated Press reports this week that U.S. health officials withheld criticism of a nevirapine study before President Bush launched a 2002 plan to distribute the drug in Africa.
Documents obtained by the Associated Press show Dr. Edmund Tramont, chief of the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS division, rewrote an NIH report to omit negative conclusions about the way a U.S.-funded drug trial was conducted in Uganda, and later ordered the research to continue over the objections of his staff. Tramont’s staff worried about record-keeping problems, violations of federal patient safeguards and other issues at the Uganda research site.
“Dr. Tramont was happy that the peoples of Africa should be used as guinea pigs, given a drug he knew very well should not be prescribed,” the article said. “In other words, they entered into a conspiracy with a pharmaceutical company to tell lies to promote the sales of nevirapine in Africa, with absolutely no consideration of the health impact of those lies on the lives of millions of Africans.”
Smuts Ngonyama, an African National Congress spokesman and editor of the journal, said the article was an opinion piece by a member and didn’t reflect official party policy. He wouldn’t identify the author.
In the United States, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a U.S. congressional investigation and demanded nevirapine no longer be distributed in Africa.
“This was not a thoughtful and reasonable decision, but a crime against humanity,” Jackson said Thursday in Chicago. “Research standards and drug quality that are unacceptable in the U.S. and other Western countries must never be pushed onto Africa.”
Some 70 percent of the 45 million people worldwide infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Studies have shown that a single dose of nevirapine to an infected woman during labor and another dose to her newborn can reduce the chances of HIV transmission by up to 50 percent.
Subsequent research has confirmed the safety and efficacy of nevirapine in protecting newborns, the World Health Organization says. But there’s evidence pregnant women who receive a single dose can develop resistance to the drug that can compromise their future AIDS treatment.
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