Political Resistance in South Africa Blocks Wide Use of HIV Drugs; Leaders Ambivalent About Distribution of Antiretrovirals

The Greater Nelspruit Rape Intervention Project (GRIP) moved into unoccupied offices of the two public hospitals in Nelspruit 18 months ago, dispensing counseling and AIDS medicines to abuse victims in this rural province on South Africa's eastern border. Volunteers helped women and children file police reports, provided them with morning-after pills to prevent pregnancy, antibiotics to treat STDs and antiretroviral drugs that some doctors believe may reduce the transmission of HIV if prescribed immediately after sexual intercourse.

But when word of the efforts reached provincial government officials, they evicted the project. "It is not the policy of the government to supply [antiretrovirals] and it causes problems for the department to try and explain to ordinary people . . . the reason why it is not supplied while [the two hospitals that house the project] do supply those medicines," the provincial health minister wrote in eviction papers filed with the court.

South Africa continues to approach antiretroviral therapies with an ambivalence that first surfaced publicly nearly two years ago when President Thabo Mbeki began questioning the drugs' efficacy and the link between HIV and AIDS. Mbeki has repeatedly emphasized the role of poverty in the spread of HIV, and last year assembled a panel of experts including dissident scientists who contend that AIDS is not caused by a virus, but a host of other factors including immune systems weakened by substandard living conditions that are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. GRIP leader Barbara Kenyon said that when the provincial health minister summoned her to a meeting to inform her she was being evicted, the official accused the agency of "poisoning" blacks. In addition, a petition that followed the agency's ensuing legal challenge to its eviction sided with the ruling African National Congress and accused GRIP of intending to "drug our people to death." But Kenyon defended the project: "There are 70,000 children born with HIV each year in this country and half of them could be spared this horrible disease with a stroke of the government's pen. AIDS is the enemy, not us."

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