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Wonder Hlongwa

THE Medical Research Council (MRC) this week began a frantic search for more than 600 people, amid fears that the gel they were testing as a preventive measure against contracting HIV, was in fact increasing the risk of infection.

Hundreds of women in South Africa, Benin, Nigeria, Uganda and India, who are being used as human guinea pigs in the US-funded research on HIV prevention, are feared to have contracted the virus during the course of the trials.

City Press spoke to two women who were HIV-negative before using the microbicides and are now positive.

They are bitter, feel used and misled and are now dealing with their HIV-positive status.

This week, Conrad, a US-based reproductive research group funding the study in four African countries and in India, called off its clinical trials on women saying it “could lead to an increased risk of HIV infection”.

MRC’s HIV Prevention Research Unit (HPRU) has dispatched its staff to call on participants to return samples of the gel.

“There are messages to as many as possible to come and give us back the gel. We have contacted several hundreds of them. Over the next month we plan to see every single one of those patients,” said HPRU principal investigator Roshini Govinden.

The study focused on a microbicide gel known as Ushercell that is manufactured by Polydex, a Canadian pharmaceutical company.

HIV-negative women apply the gel in their vagina an hour before sex in the hope that it could prevent them from contracting HIV.

City Press understands that in townships around Durban some of the participants have been selling the gel to their peers saying it prevents HIV/Aids, raising fears that more people could be infected.

“It’s scary because I know some participants have been selling it as a cure for Aids in townships. They sell it for R5,” said one MRC member, who recruited the participants.

When City Press visited one site at Hlabisa, participants claimed that some of the researchers who recruited them said the gel would make them hot in bed.

“When I first applied it, my boyfriend asked me why I was so luscious that night. Then I told him I had applied the gel and he loves it,” said one of the women, who cannot be named to protect her identity.

Some of the participants in the remote rural village of Hlabisa in northern KwaZulu-Natal said they were still using the gel and had not heard of the new developments.

Participants are paid R150 a month for transport to and from the research sites and are told that if they contract HIV during the research, the sponsors of the research will look after them.

MaNgidi Sithole, a community leader in Hlabisa, said people allow themselves to be used as guinea pigs because of poverty.

“People are hungry and illiterate. If there is anything that promises money they are prepared to participate because it will better their lives, no matter how little the money is,” she said.

There are fears that if no measures ) Turn to Page 4

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