AIDS Prevention Drug AZT Trials in Africa

Although the AIDS virus has been evident in our society for several decades now, a cure has still not been invented. Preventive measures, however, are being developed. One such method is that of the ACTG 076 protocol which showed in clinical trials in the US and France "that if a mother takes zidovudine (AZT) daily from the middle of her pregnancy until delivery, receives intravenous AZT during delivery, gives her infant oral AZT for the first six weeks of life and does not breast-feed, the transmission of HIV from mother to child can be reduced by two-thirds."¹ Because of different medical and lifestyle practices in Africa, experiments were started in Africa to find a preventive treatment that would work to prevent the transmission of AIDS from mothers to their children in a shorter course of treatment. These experiments have undergone harsh ethical criticism because the experiments involve giving a number of the women a placebo treatment to act as a control group, thus their children will be more likely to acquire AIDS from their mothers. These questions of ethics, however, are viewed form several different perspectives: those of the doctors who are working with the patients in Africa, and those of the men who are looking at these experiments from developed countries, such as the US.

Danstan Bugenda and Philippa Musoke-Mudido offered some of their arguments to support the way that the experiments are being conducted in an article in The Washington Post. They start by stating that after consideration the World Health Organization found that trials with placebo pills were the best way to determine the effect of the AZT treatment on the African women. The women who participate in the studies meet all of the participant guidelines that have been set by national and international ethical review committees by completing education and counseling about the experiments, as well as signing a consent form that describes the risks of participating in the experiment and the possibility of receiving a placebo.¹