RESEARCHER REPLIES TO HIV STORM

One of the researchers at the centre of the storm over whether medical incompetence in Swaziland led to children becoming infected with HIV has called for an investigation in into how Swazi children became HIV-positive even though their mothers were negative.

It was suggested children may have been infected by dirty needles.

When the news of the research broke the Swazi Government and the Swaziland Nurses Association (SNA).immediately condemned it and dismissed its findings. The nurses even went so far as to call the researchers ‘racist’.

Now, Devon Brewer, one of the researchers, in a letter to the Swazi Observer, the newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, has called for an investigation into ‘the possibility of blood-borne HIV transmission in both children and adults in Swaziland’.

He added, ‘To instill both public and scientific confidence, these investigations must be rigorous, comprehensive, transparent, and independent of individuals and organisations that have denied the potential importance of blood-borne HIV transmission in Africa. Investigations should also be designed to identify problems and correct them and not to assign blame or prosecute.

‘It is not sufficient to claim that healthcare is mostly safe. Healthcare providers must demonstrate that healthcare is always safe, patients must insist that it is so and governments must ensure that it is. In the meantime, the public must be educated about the full spectrum of risks of blood-borne HIV transmission and how to avoid them.’

To read the full letter click here.

SWAZILAND NURSES AND HIV HYSTERIA

Don’t shoot the messenger.

The outcry in Swaziland at news that one in five Swazi children with the HIV virus may have been infected by negligent medical staff is now hysterical.

The latest to join the chorus of denial is the Swaziland Nurses Association (SNA).

It has condemned a respected academic journal the International Journal of STD and HIV, published by the British Association of Sexual Health and HIV, and its researchers as ‘racist’ because it reported that the children probably became HIV-positive because Swazi medical staff gave them injections with contaminated needles. The injections were often unnecessary.

The SNA is not alone in denying the research findings. The Swaziland Ministry of Health has rejected the researchers’ findings because they did not have permission from the Swazi Government to conduct the research.

The Secretary General of SNA Sibusiso Lushaba told the Weekend Observer, a newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, ‘Their research findings are utter hogwash and rubbish. The allegations they peddle have never happened and will never happen even beyond their wildest dreams. They are out to slander not only the good name and work of nurses in the country but in the region and eventually the world.’

He added SNA would ‘leave no stone unturned in their bid to unravel the true colours of the organisation, while exposing its racist agenda’.

He said that the Swaziland Ministry of Health’s Scientific and Ethics Committee should be strengthened and a nursing and medical research authority should be established to ‘investigate and regulate anyone wishing to conduct research in the country while ensuring that they do not have ulterior motives. It should also tail them as they conduct their research to ensure that they do everything ethically and produce ethically balanced research findings that will be factual and be of assistance to other research fellows and not sensational as the British organisation’s’.

Lushaba and other critics in Swaziland have a deep ignorance of how scientific academic research is done. The research findings that have caused upset would have been ‘peer reviewed’ by other academics and the methods of research would have been verified and validated by scientific experts.

This research is not like reports published in the Observer and other Swaziland newspapers: full of lies, half truths and hysteria.