Deadly toxic chemical hazard warning by Sigma Chemical Co. on tiny 25 mg bottles of AZT supplied to research laboratories (move your cursor over the magnifying glass to read it). 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 - to be taken every day until you die. 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, then subtitled Questions of safety and utility, South African President Thabo Mbeki ordered an enquiry into the safety of the AIDS drug AZT (PDF, 1.2 MB).

Introducing AZT: 'A world of antiretroviral experience' cites research findings published after Debating AZT went to print in November 2000, and liberally quotes South Africa's leading AIDS experts, AIDS activists and AIDS journalists to enable you to form your own opinion about the drug (PDF, 1.4 MB).

For an overview see Why do President Mbeki and Dr Tshabalala-Msimang warn against the use of ARV drugs like AZT? (PDF, 98 KB). (Hi res version for printing in 'Quick links')

Granted, AZT is extraordinarily toxic, but does it have any countervailing 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 GlaxoSmithKline SA CEO John Kearney on 26 April 2001 addresses this (PDF, 51 KB), conveying the gist of A Critical Analysis of the Pharmacology of AZT and its Use in AIDS by Australian physicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and her medical colleagues, published in June 1999 as a special supplement to Current Medical Research and Opinion. It's summed up in their unpublished letter (PDF, 96 KB).

The AZT triphosphorylation problem examined in this paper has been discussed by other scientists, such as Lavie and colleagues of the Max Plank Institute and by Dr Dennis Blakeslee, a medical correspondent for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

GlaxoSmithKline hired Professor David Back at the University of Liverpool to claim in an expert report filed in the High Court in South Africa that AZT is triphosphorylated just like the company says it is. Papadopulos-Eleopulos and colleagues examined and rebutted his false claims.

We also provided the MCC with 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  critically examining the notion that nevirapine prevents mother to child transmission of HIV (PDF, 1.23 MB).

The MCC's response to our first letter was to issue a recommendation that nevirapine administration to pregnant women and their babies should henceforth always be combined with AZT. Our further correspondence criticized this decision in the light of the many published studies showing how AZT harms unborn and newly born children.

On receiving our submissions, individual members of the MCC told Health Minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang that they'd been 'amazed' by our 'detailed research' of which they had been 'unaware'. Well, clearly. We can reveal that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang read all our correspondence to the MCC with great interest, as did President Mbeki.

Poisoning our Children: AZT and nevirapine in pregnancy collates our letters in a book (PDF, 1.08 MB), including the MCC's ultimate non-response to our submissions (PDF, 177 KB); an afterword reviewing 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; and how these drugs are causing brain damage to South African children, crippling them mentally and physically.

A leaflet Why do Zackie Achmat, Nathan Geffen and Mark Heywood want pregnant African women and their babies to be given AZT? What AZT does to unborn and newly born children gives an overview of this horror (PDF, 76 KB). (Hi res version for printing in 'Quick links')

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

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

Here are the front cover (PDF, 988 KB), back-cover blurb (PDF, 15 KB), and prospectus (PDF, 460 KB) for Brink's forthcoming new book, 'Just say yes, Mr President': Mbeki and AIDS (PDF, 261 KB).

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

On 26 November 2004 the Mail&Guardian published an article in its special World AIDS Day supplement entitled Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There's a natural answer to AIDS (PDF, 167 KB), in which we stated matter-of-factly:

• 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 TAC complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about these statements, as if they were untrue. The ASA declined to consider the merits of our submission (PDF, 238 KB), saying it wanted one 'credible independent expert' to substantiate the statements, and not the hundreds we cited, and banned us from repeating them (PDF, 1.4 MB). We then provided a single expert verification statement by the late Professor Sam Mhlongo (PDF, 72 KB), and followed up with a query (PDF, 94 KB). When the ASA rejected Professor Mhlongo's supporting statement, we asked Professor Peter Eagles, chairman of the Medicines Control Council, to confirm to the ASA that our statements are perfectly true (PDF, 17 KB), and requested the same of MCC Registrar Dr Humphrey Zokufa (PDF, 24 KB). But no joy from either.

On 11 November 2005 the Mail&Guardian published Brink's letter (edited a bit) about the harm AZT does and the M&G's editorial policy to promote the drug  (PDF, 20 KB). Professor Cyril Karabus of the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Cape Town and a schoolboy called Alex Myers responded the following week by writing in to say how dishonest and dangerous he is (PDF, 121 KB). Brink replied to Karabus directly (PDF, 48 KB).

A letter to Constitutional Law expert Professor Pierre de Vos at the University of the Western Cape (PDF, 36 KB).

The  Judith Miller Award for AIDS Journalism in South Africa was won in 2005 by leading AIDS journalist Kerry Cullinan (PDF, 19 KB).