This is incorrect. According to his brother-in-law Dr Isaac Amuah, quoted in the Washington Post on the same day, ‘the immediate cause of Makgatho’s death was complications from a gall bladder operation’ on 30 November.
He mentioned to the Sunday Times that he’d also suffered ‘problems with his pancreas’. Regrettably, the misconception that Makgatho Mandela died of AIDS originated from former President Mandela himself, as indicated in the headline of the article, ‘Mandela Says AIDS Led to Death of Son’. The Washington Post quoted Dr Amuah adding: ‘But he said that AIDS was a contributing factor and that Mandela was determined to portray the death as resulting from AIDS to demystify the disease.’
Addressing journalists at his home, Mandela said that declaring that his son had ‘died of AIDS … was the only way to turn the tide and make HIV/AIDS an ordinary disease like any other’. According to Dr Amuah, Makgatho ‘had been receiving antiretroviral treatment for more than a year’. Pancreatitis and gall bladder problems, caused by lactic acidosis, are a wellknown consequence of ARV drug toxicity.
The gall bladder is part of the liver system; liver failure is now the leading cause of death among HIV-positive people treated with ARVs (Reuters, 19 November 1999 – see: http://aras.ab.ca/haart.html and http://aras.ab.ca/azt.html (search: ‘pancreas’, ‘gall bladder’ and ‘liver’); and read Debating AZT: Mbeki and the AIDS controversy and The trouble with nevirapine, both posted at www.tig.org.za).
Although the potentially lethal toxicity of ARVs such as AZT and nevirapine is abundantly established in the medical literature, this is little known by the newspaper-reading public due to their billing always as ‘life-saving’ by wellintentioned journalists, and, in the case of the Mail&Guardian, express editorial policy to promote the sale and use of these drugs and to black out any countervailing information.
On 26 November 2004, for instance, we published an invited article in the World AIDS Day supplement of that newspaper, in which we stated, inter alia, that ‘Hundreds of studies have found that AZT is profoundly toxic to all cells of the human body, and particularly to the blood cells of the immune system’ and that ‘Numerous studies have found that children exposed to AZT in the womb and after birth suffer brain damage, neurological disorders, paralysis, spasticity, mental retardation, epilepsy, other serious diseases and early death.’