Nevirapine in South Africa

Following a legal challenge by the Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa’s Constitutional Court orders the government to make the HIV drug nevirapine available to all HIV-positive pregnant women and their newborn children at all public hospitals. The denialist Mbeki government had previously tried to limit availability to a few pilot sites, despite evidence that the drug prevents mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The ruling is a major defeat for the government, although no mass-scale provision of nevirapine is actually implemented until 2004.