SA Aids Prisoners to Get Anti-retrovirals

A group of prisoners with HIV/Aids in South Africa obtained a court ruling this week ordering their jail to supply anti-retroviral drugs.

A high court in Durban gave Westville prison two weeks to come up with a treatment programme involving the life-extending medicine.

Treatment activists welcomed the decision for putting pressure on the government to tackle the soaring rate of infection, illness and death among inmates.

Fifteen prisoners at Westville with full-blown Aids took the jail and the departments of health and correctional services to court to obtain their constitutional and legal right to treatment.

Their submission stated that there had been 110 Aids-related deaths at the prison this year and that the authorities delayed access to the drugs by permitting only one inmate a day to receive counselling, a prerequisite to treatment.

Judge Thumba Pillay criticised government officials for a "singular lack of any commitment to appreciate the seriousness and urgency of the situation".

The correctional services department said it would appeal the ruling, stressing that it did care about inmates' health and was in the process of designing a programme to treat all those in need.

South Africa has more than five million people with HIV, the world's highest, and its prisons are notorious breeding grounds for the epidemic because of overcrowding, rape and shared needles.

Between 1995 and 2001 the number of deaths increased fivefold, with more than 1,000 inmates out of 179,000 dying each year. Many succumbed to tuberculosis, a disease that has proved merciless to Aids sufferers.

Precise figures do not exist but the rate of infection among inmates is estimated to be 40%, more than double the level nationwide.

Officials say prison gangs use the virus by ordering inmates with HIV to rape individuals singled out for punishment, a ritual known as "slow puncture".