Karen Cohen
In South Africa, rapid scale-up of the HIV treatment programme is happening within already overstretched and regularly understaffed health care facilities [1]. While the anti retrovirals currently included in South African guidelines are generally safe, and high adverse drug reactions (ADRs) only occur during a small proportion of patients, the dimensions of the treatment programme means absolutely the ADR burden could also be considerable [2]. Strategies to attenuate preventable harm should form an important a part of such large-scale public health programmes; yet, in our setting, the burden of ADRs generally, and therefore the burden of ADRs attributable to antiretroviral therapy (ART) specifically, remains largely un-known.