By Patrick Leeman and Sapa
Data will be presented at the South African Aids conference that began in Durban on Sunday to show that 100 000 South African women have received nevirapine to prevent HIV transmission to their babies in the past two years.
Professor James McIntyre, one of the world's leading authorities on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission and head of the Chris Hani Baragwanath peri-natal HIV unit, gave these figures in an interview.
"No serious safety issues had been found during the use of the drug on these women," McIntyre said.
A demand by the South African Medicines Control Council last week that Boehringer Ingleheim, the makers of nevirapine, submit new efficacy data within 90 days or face the drug being withdrawn, is likely to dominate the conference and has aroused an international uproar.
McIntyre said it was the council's job "to review safety of medications but they also have to consider public health implications".
"Since 1999 when the drug was first registered, there has been considerable evidence of its safety and efficacy.
"In the past two years, since nevirapine has been given at some South African public hospitals, easily 100 000 women and their babies have received single-dose nevirapine to prevent HIV transmission to babies without serious safety issues.
"It will be difficult to get efficacy data from this, however, because these are not research projects," he said.
Nonetheless, he said that in terms of efficacy, a previous South African-based study and one in progress with 600 mothers had shown around 11 percent of babies that received the single dose were born HIV positive.
Giving an indication of how many mothers had had treatment, McIntyre said that in the past year alone, "14 000 mothers had received it in KwaZulu-Natal, 8 000 at Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital, around 8 000 in western Gauteng and 10 000 in the Western Cape".
Meanwhile, the Treatment Action Campaign resolved at its national conference being held to coincide with the Aids conference in Durban to lift the suspension on its programme of civil disodedience.
The organisation took a resolution to go ahead with civil disobedience in view of the intransigence of the government on unveiling a strategy on the use of anti-retrovirals for people with HIV and Aids.
The TAC resolution asked all labour federations to call a dispute at the National Economic Development and Labour Council and it requested that the Congress of South African Trade Unions give it space at their national congress to brief delegates on the treatment plan campaign.
The resolution called for an immediate start to litigation for a treatment plan.
Chairperson of the TAC, Zackie Achmat, told 600 delegates that Deputy President Jacob Zuma had asked the organisation on April 25 this year to suspend its original civil disobedience campaign because it believed the government had an action plan on anti-retrovirals.
However, there were now serious doubts that the government had an action plan and was intending to put it into place.
Achmat took national religious leaders to task for not supporting the TAC at the last meeting of the South African National Aids Advisory Council in August.
The TAC conference said the Medicines Control Council had to be held "to account" for its decision to reject a Ugandan study on which the registration of the anti-Aids drug nevirapine was based.
The delegates at the conference also said there was a need to fast-track the registration of generic anti-retrovirals.