Deadly toxic chemical hazard warning by Sigma Chemical Co. on tiny 25mg bottles of AZT supplied to research laboratories. You obviously don’t find this advice on GlaxoSmithKline's AZT label, or in its package insert recommending a daily dose of up to sixty times as much. Or let’s face it: who would swallow it?

On 28 October 1999, after reading an early draft of High Court advocate Anthony Brink’s book, Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS drug controversy (PDF, 1.2 MB), then subtitled Questions of safety and utility, South African President Thabo Mbeki ordered an enquiry into the safety of the AIDS drug AZT. But disregarding all the key literature, the South African Medicines Control Council (MCC) botched it completely: ‘The drug being out there is justified,’ reckoned MCC chairperson at the time Helen Rees.

Introducing AZT: 'A world of antiretroviral experience' (PDF, 445 kB) cites research findings published after Debating AZT went to print, and liberally quotes South Africa’s leading AIDS experts, activists and journalists to help you make up your own mind about the drug.

For a quick overview of AZT, have a look at Why do President Mbeki and Dr Tshabalala-Msimang warn against the use of ARV drugs like AZT? (PDF, 98 kB). Well you may wonder after reading it, Why do Zackie Achmat, Nathan Geffen and Mark Heywood want pregnant African women to be given AZT? What AZT does to unborn babies. (PDF, 76 kB)

Sure, AZT is extremely poisonous, but does it have any countervailing therapeutic value as a medicine? In other words, do its benefits outweigh its risks? Or put more directly: is AZT really antiretroviral? An Open Letter to John Kearney CEO of GlaxoSmithKline SA (PDF, 51 kB), sent on 26 April 2001, talks about this.

In April 2001 the MCC conditionally approved nevirapine, another extremely toxic drug, for experimental use to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV at eighteen pilot sites in the country. However, the Treatment Action Campaign successfully applied to court to force the government to abandon its UNAIDS-sanctioned pilot study, and to provide the drug to all HIV-positive women giving birth in government hospitals, as well as to their newborn babies. Read Adv Brink’s hard-hitting exposé of the whole shambles in The trouble with nevirapine (PDF, 842 kB). Here’s the cover, front (PDF, 199 kB) and back (PDF, 319 kB). And here are the inside covers (PDF, 24kB).

Between June 2004 and January 2005, Adv Brink’s Treatment Information Group (TIG) sent ten letters to the MCC, commencing with an enquiry about the status of its review of its special registration of nevirapine for administration to HIV-positive women in labour and their newborn babies – a review that it had announced in May 2002 after a licensing application for similar special registration had been thrown out by the US FDA in March.

The MCC responded to the TIG’s first letter by issuing a recommendation that in future nevirapine administration to pregnant women and their babies should always be combined with AZT. The TIG’s further correspondence criticised this decision, in view of the profusion of published research literature showing how AZT harms unborn and newly born children. The TIG’s letters reviewing this literature have been collated in a book, POISONING OUR CHILDREN: AZT in pregnancy. (PDF, 551 kB). Here's the cover, front (PDF, 94 kB) and back (PDF, 9 kB).

The TIG also sent up to the MCC Papadopulos-Eleopulos’s et al. seminal critiques of AZT as an AIDS drug (PDF, 416 kB), and AZT and nevirapine as perinatal anti-HIV prophylactics (PDF, 2.03 MB), along with an easy-to-understand slideshow (PDF, 1.23 MB) that critically examines the notion that nevirapine prevents mother to child transmission of HIV. In its sixth and seventh letters, the TIG analyses and takes to pieces the World Health Organization’s recent recommendations (PDF, 516 kB) regarding the administration of AZT to pregnant women in the Developing World (but then see who wrote them).

Individual members of the MCC have been telephoning Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang and telling her that they have been ‘amazed’ by the ‘detailed research’ contained in it, of which they had been ‘unaware’. Well, clearly. We can reveal that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang has been reading all our correspondence to the MCC with great interest, as has President Mbeki. The annexure to the TIG’s seventh letter, concerning the corruption of the Ugandan HIVNET 012 study, particularly caught his eye, as you'll see from the heading of his office's grateful letter of acknowledgment. (The scandal is set out in The trouble with nevirapine, mentioned above.)

Inventing AZT (PDF, 28 kB) is the scoop story told to Adv Brink by Professor Richard Beltz, the scientist who first synthesized AZT in 1961 – as an experimental cell-poison to kill human cells. Read how Adv Brink changed his mind about the wisdom of giving AZT to pregnant women by bringing to his attention what it does to their babies.

Licensing AZT (PDF, 41 kB) describes the fraudulent circumstances in which AZT came to be licensed by the US FDA as an AIDS drug – with everyone just following suit, no questions asked, our own MCC included.

Here are the prefatory pages to Adv Brink’s forthcoming new book, ‘Just say yes, Mr President’: Mbeki and AIDS (PDF, 261 kB), which will give you an idea of what it’s all about, summed up in the back-cover blurb (PDF, 15 kB). Here’s the front cover (PDF, 988 kB).

Here’s a press release, with a self-explanatory title: What killed Makgatho Mandela? (PDF, 58 kB)

Read the TIG response (PDF, 238 kB) to the TAC complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority concerning our article in the World AIDS Day supplement of the Mail&Guardian on 26 November 2004 entitled Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There’s a natural answer to AIDS (PDF, 167 kB). This is a summary of what was submitted to the ASA about the natural alternative to AZT. Here’s the ASA’s fantastic ruling (PDF, 1.4 MB). As you’ll see, the ASA did not consider the merits of the submission before issuing its ruling, explaining that it wanted one ‘credible independent expert’, and not the hundreds we cited, to substantiate our statements that

• Hundreds of studies have found that AZT is profoundly toxic to all cells of the human body, and particularly to the blood cells of our immune system.
• Numerous studies have found that children exposed to AZT in the womb suffer brain damage, neurological disorders, paralysis, spasticity, mental retardation, epilepsy, other serious diseases and early death. 

The ASA has since been provided with an expert verification statement (PDF, 72 kB), and we look forward to the day it gets around to applying its mind to the matter. This is a query (PDF, 94 kB) the TIG sent the ASA, which you'll find illuminating.

And here's a request (PDF, 17 kB) to Professor Peter Eagles, chairman of the Medicines Control Council, enquiring about his MCC's long outstanding response to our ten letters on the foetal and neonatal toxicity of AZT and nevirapine, and asking him to confirm to the ASA that the above statements are perfectly true. (The ASA, you'll read, rejected Professor Mhlongo's supporting statement.) And here's our letter (PDF, 24 kB) to MCC Registrar Dr Humphrey Zokufa in the same matter.

Here’s the MCC’s response (PDF, 177 kB) at last. (Stay tuned – but meanwhile read the latest research reports on how ARV drugs given during pregnancy stunt infant body and head growth and damage bone marrow causing reduced blood cell production in childhood. The reports are reviewed in the updated Afterword of Poisoning our Children: AZT and nevirapine in pregnancy [PDF, 1.0 MB].)

To his great surprise, the Mail&Guardian published Adv Brink’s sharply critical letter (PDF, 20 kB) on 11 November 2005 (edited a bit). The following week, Professor Cyril Karabus of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town and a schoolboy called Alex Myers responded by writing in (PDF, 121 kB) to say how dishonest and dangerous he is. Adv Brink replied (PDF, 48 kB) firmly.

This is a friendly letter (PDF, 36 kB) to Constitutional Law expert Professor Pierre de Vos at the University of the Western Cape.

The Judith Miller Award for AIDS Journalism in South Africa, 2005 (PDF, 19 kB).

An open letter (PDF, 90kB) to Dr Olive Shisana, CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council and lead author of the 'South African National HIV Prevalence, HIV Incidence, Behaviour and Communication Survey, 2005'. ('You can't be serious.')

In an open letter (PDF, 64kB) to Professor Anthon Heyns, CEO of the South African National Blood Service, Adv Brink spelt out the logic of the HSRC's 'HIV Prevalence' report for policy at his blood bank. A day after it was sent, Professor Heyns published an article in JAMA, the world's leading medical journal, claiming that yes, segregationist policy at the blood bank was the right way to go after all; why, he'd proven it scientifically. Unlike Adv Brink in his ironic letter, Professor Heyns wasn't joking; he really meant it.

The TAC arranged a hit (PDF, 96kB) on Adv Brink in the Sunday Times on 5 February 2006, to which he replied (PDF, 11kB). These are the plugs (PDF, 18kB) to which he referred in his letter. Here's (PDF, 93kB) an edited version of the letter published two weeks later, leaving out the embarrassing 'product placement' story.

Adv Brink posed some questions (PDF, 44 kB) to leading AIDS journalist Tamar Kahn about an exciting article (PDF, 162 kB) she wrote.

Here's a reminder (PDF, 30 kB) to HSRC CEO Dr Olive Shisana, posing more awkward questions.

And here's a letter (PDF, 31 kB) to Dr Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV/AIDS Clinicians Society, suggesting a new way to fight AIDS.

The Treatment Action Campaign is trying to shut us down in the High Court! Here’s Adv Brink’s answering affidavit (PDF, 514 kB), blowing the TAC, its drugs and its virus out the sky. Filleted for relevance you can read the TAC’s founding affidavits hyperlinked to it. This is Professor Sam Mhlongo’s confirming affidavit (PDF, 31 kB).

On 4 January 2007 we served (PDF, 719kB) a 59-page draft bill of indictment (PDF, 137 kB) at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, in which we apply for the prosecution of TAC leader Zackie Achmat on a charge of genocide for his direct criminal role in the deaths of thousands of South Africans from ARV poisoning. (Read the Spanish translation (PDF, 397 kB) that we prepared for the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo – from Argentina.)

Arising from local press reporting of the ICC complaint, we addressed an open letter to Trevor Ncube, CEO of the M&G, entitled Media Complicity in Genocide: the Case of the Mail&Guardian (PDF, 93 kB), and served a copy on the ICC with supporting annexures (PDF, 23 kB) under this covering letter (PDF, 36 kB). We kept it embargoed for a week, offering more time if needed, for Mr Ncube to consider and respond to it unrushed. No joy, however; the letter was an appeal to conscience, but apparently no one was home.

TIG Press Statement (PDF, 45kB): On the 50th anniversary of the thalidomide disaster, another tragedy of countless children killed and maimed foretold.