Nicoli Jean Nattrass

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Nicoli Nattrass is a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. She is the Co-Director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa (iCWild), and was the founding director of the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) and previously the director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit (ASRU) within the CSSR (one of the first academic organisations in South Africa to study the socio-economic and political impacts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic).Nattrass was active in the anti-Apartheid struggle and is an internationally recognized scholar. Her published work is mainly in the area of the political economy of South Africa, AIDS policy (focusing in the struggle for antiretroviral treatment), labour-intensive growth and human wildlife conflict.Nattrass has twice won UCT's book award which recognises outstanding books written by members of staff.Her most widely cited work was written with her husband, Jeremy Seekings on Class Race and Inequality in South Africa. During the period of AIDS denialism in South Africa, Nattrass was an advocate of public access to science-based AIDS treatment. In the court-case brought by civil society organisations against the South African state, Nattrass authored an affidavit in which she modelled the cost-effectiveness of HIV medicines as both a public health and human rights imperative.Nattrass was critical of Thabo Mbeki's AIDS policy in South Africa, and was threatened with libel charges by a Government Minister for documenting the South African Cabinet's support for unproven HIV treatments.Nattrass's research on the cost-effectiveness of HIV treatment formed part of the Treatment Action Campaign's successful constitutional court case to force the Mbeki government to provide public access to antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive people. In a study published in 2008, Nattrass estimated that more than 340,000 unnecessary AIDS deaths in South Africa between 1999 and 2007 were the result of this policy. The results of this study were later corroborated, using a different methodology, by scientists at Harvard University. They too modelled AIDS-related mortality and morbidity in South Africa as the result of the government's decision not to provide public access to HIV medicines. (Source: DBPedia)