SA election row over Aids
Allegations that the South African government was using the country’s Aids crisis to gain votes dominated the country’s 14 April general election. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) said that only 2,700 people are receiving the drugs, far short of the government’s target of 53,000. Pictured left is TAC leader Zackie Achmat tackling South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on the election trail. Meanwhile, Reuters report that South Africans spend more time at funerals than other activities outside work. Each day, it is estimated, about 600 South Africans die of Aids. With an estimated 5.3 million of its 45 million people infected, South Africa has more people living with HIV/Aids than any other country. |
 photo: alex caballero |
“Our Asian values protect us” is a common phrase with regard to Aids in the Asian subcontinent. Yet studies show that Asian countries will lead the Aids epidemic in the next few years, with 20-25m HIV cases by 2010 and the most affected areas seeing deaths rise by over 40 per cent.
“ South Asia stands at what epidemiologists call the ‘tipping point’ in the trajectory of the disease,” says UNICEF executive director, Carol Bellamy. Leaders in this region hold on to the belief that infections occur only in ‘deviant populations’ (commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, men who have sex with men). The reality is very different.
A World Bank report states that 90 per cent of infected women in India were married and had only one sex partner, their husband.
The lives of South Asian women and their ability to remain free from infection
need to be viewed through a prism of family and society. Gender inequality,
manifested by low social status, illiteracy and lack of empowerment,
has increased women’s susceptibility to HIV.
“
The situation of girls and women in South Asia and Southeast Asia is bad
and the HIV/Aids problem just exposes how vulnerable girls and women are
to infection; not because of their behaviour but because they have no control
over their own lives,” says Nafis Sadik, UN special envoy for Aids
in Asia.
The form of patriarchy in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Nepal severely affects the status of women in society. In most cases, a woman cannot inherit or own immovable property. This makes her very dependent on her marital home for security and creates conditions under which husbands never fear losing their wives as a consequence of their ‘high-risk’ activities.
“ They cannot negotiate anything. I know in some cases that even when a wife knows that the spouse is infected, she cannot insist that he use a condom. They have no rights,” says Sadik.
Women comprise 50 per cent of those infected in countries like India, and their numbers will continue to rise if attention is not paid to gender issues surrounding the disease in this region.
Prevention messages need to be focused not only on ‘high prevalence groups’ but also on the general population.
The answer to the ‘heterosexual epidemic in Asia’ does not necessarily lie in the ABC approach (Abstain, Be faithful, use a Condom).
“ What is needed is positive, concrete change that will give more power and confidence to women and girls, and transform relations between women and men at all levels of society,” says Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General. Shalini Kukreja
See also Standing up for women
‘Great White Hope’ bounces back like ‘Rocky’
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US denialist dies of Aids
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The US Government is once again facing growing criticism over its alleged support of the pharmaceutical giants and its failure to back the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) push for cheap generic anti-HIV drugs.
The issue came to a head in March at a US-sponsored meeting in Botswana to evaluate generic combination drugs.
The Bush administration has pledged to spend $15 billion over the next five years on the fight against Aids in Africa. But so far only a tiny fraction of this money has been forthcoming from the US.
The WHO and activists such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) believe that the money should be used to buy generic drugs, which cost a fraction of the branded products. The generic HIV drugs are also available in a single pill, and are, according to the WHO, safer and much easier to take.
However, the US Global Aids Coordinator, Randall Tobias, a former chairman of pharmaco giant Eli Lilly, has said that he is concerned about the drugs’ safety. “The problem is there is no process, no principles, no standards in place today, from a regulatory point of view, to make this assurance,” he said.
But this view was not shared by Senator Edward Kennedy: “At worst, the new process [of evaluating the safety of drugs] will give the pharmaceutical industry further opportunity to deny these urgently needed generic medicines.”
MSF, in a letter to Tobias, pointed out that they were providing antiretroviral therapy to more than 11,000 people in over 20 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe and expects the total number of patients on treatments to reach 25,000 in 25 countries by the end of 2004.
The Bush Aids plan, released last month, said that procurement of drugs would have to comply with federal intellectual-property protections.
This has led to concerns from international health experts that if the US decides not to buy generic drugs, wide-scale HIV treatments could prove to be impossible.
HIV activists fear that the WHO ‘3 by 5’ initiative, to get 3 million extra people onto anti-HIV drugs by 2005, is doomed to failure because rich western countries are not backing their rhetoric with hard cash.
MADaboutART opens centre in South Africa
For details, visit: www.madaboutart.org |
US
boxing champ and ‘Great White Hope’ of the 1990s, Tommy Morrison,
pictured, is to star in a movie version of his life and career. Morrison, the
grandnephew of movie legend John Wayne, will appear in an upcoming biopic called ‘The
Duke’. He was forced to end his lucrative boxing career after testing
HIV positive in 1996.
David Pasquarelli, an outspoken opponent of the link between HIV and Aids
in the USA, has himself died of the disease.
MADaboutART, the UK-based charity aiming to unite children around the world
in fighting and understanding HIV and Aids, has opened an arts centre in the
Western Cape in South Africa. Pictured at a party for the local kids to celebrate
the opening of the Masizame Arts and Education Centre are MADaboutART chair
Larry Gurney and centre workers.