Compiled by Martin Flynn

Get on Board the Jo’burg to G8 bus
ActionAid’s Get on Board campaign is on the road and heading for Scotland. A brightly decorated bus left Johannesburg at the end of March on an epic 12,000km journey across the continent and towards Scotland to arrive in time for the G8 summit at Gleneagles, which takes place from 6-8 July.
The 16-seater bus, emblazoned with ‘Make Poverty History’ and ‘Get on Board’ logos, is visiting towns and villages along the way to highlight the plight of the continent’s poor.
“ActionAid is exposing the injustice of poverty in Africa direct to the world’s leaders,” said chief executive Ramesh Singh.“It is vital that the G8 listens to the people of Africa, and that they recognise their rights, spirit and potential and agree a way to make poverty history.”
• Track the Get on Board journey online: www.actionaid.org/getonboard
• Join the alliance of over 100 groups at the 2 July Edinburgh demo: www.makepovertyhistory.com

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Denialists hamper South Africa Aids fight
The battle against HIV and Aids in South Africa is being severely hampered by a strange alliance of Aids denialists, government inaction and propagandists advocating vitamins as an alternative to antiretroviral drugs.The country’s Medical Research Council says HIV and Aids is still South Africa’s leading cause of death, accounting for over a third of deaths in Gauteng province and over 42 per cent in KwaZulu-Natal.
Nationwide, HIV and Aids now kills one in three with an estimated 1,000 people dying every day from the disease.South Africa has the highest number of infected people in the world, with 5.3 million people
living with the virus. But only 40,000 people are on life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) therapy.
The South African government promises state funding for ARVs, which is continually delayed.
The country’s Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, continues to deny the effectiveness of ARVs and instead backs dietary improvements, vitamins and garlic.
“I don’t want to be pressurized by a target of three million people on antiretrovirals by 2005,” she recently said. “All I am bombarded about is antiretrovirals.” And the embattled minister, called Dr Garlic by her many critics, highlighted the drugs’ side effects and advocated that people instead improved their diets and used garlic, olive oil, lemon and beetroot.“Raw garlic and a skin of a lemon; not only do they give you a beautiful face and skin but they also protect you from disease,” she said. Meanwhile, South Africa’s HIV lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has taken a vitamin salesman to court to stop him claiming that the TAC is bankrolled by the pharmaceutical industry.Dr Matthias Rath, a wealthy German whose products are banned in several western countries, has run a high profile campaign attacking ARVs saying they are poisonous and multivitamins alone can prevent Aids.He has accused Aids activists, the UN and the US and British governments of being drug promoters for the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organisation (WHO), UNAIDS and UNICEF criticised his campaign as “wrong and misleading”.“Vitamins and nutritional supplements alone cannot take the place of treatment and care for people living with HIV/Aids which include treatment for infections, ARV therapy and a balanced diet,” the agencies said.“Antiretroviral therapy has been shown in numerous studies to reduce the replication of HIV in the body, reduce the incidence of opportunistic infections, Aids-related illness and improve the quality of life.”

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Brazil rejects US funds and fundamentalism
Brazil has become the first country to take a stand against the abstinence dominated agenda of US funding for HIV and Aids. Brazil’s Aids Commission last month told the US Agency for International Development (USAID) it didn’t want the $40 million remaining from a 2003-2004 grant and refused to sign a pledge condemning prostitution. It said the US requirement that recipient groups condemn prostitution would hamper their work in a country where prostitution is not a crime and sex workers are active in HIV prevention work.The Brazil Aids Commission, that rejected the US funds and made a stand on prostitutions, is made up of cabinet members, scientists, church representatives and community advocates.
Brazil is seen as a model of effective action against HIV and Aids, in part because of the open and accepting way they work with prostitutes, gays and other high-risk groups.
Effective prevention campaigns, condom distribution and involvement of sex worker groups means the country now has 660,000 HIV cases, a fraction of what was predicted a decade ago.
Pedro Chequer, director of Brazil’s Aids programme, said: “We can’t control the
disease with principles that are Manichean, theological, fundamentalist or Shiite.”
“US demands are an interference that harm the Brazilian policy regarding diversity,
ethical principles and human rights,” Chequer continued.Since 1996, the country has provided free antiretroviral drugs and pharmaceutical companies are making cheap generic copies of expensive antiretroviral medications for use at home and to export to poorer countries in Latin America and Africa.“Why should we adopt a different orientation if we have been successful for more than 10 years?” asked Sonia Correa, Brazilian Aids activist and chair of the International Working Group on Sexuality.
“The US is doing the same in other countries - bullying, forcing - but not every country has the possibility to say no,” said Correa. Republican lawmakers in Washington are still pressing for federal funds to be cut to all groups who don’t support President Bush’s right-wing Christian fundamentalist agenda promoting sexual abstinence, condemning prostitution and opposing needle exchange programmes for drug users.
Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has begun legal action against the government and some states because they are diverting essential HIV prevention funding into strange schemes promoting abstinence.








Miss Universe contestants boost Aids awareness
Wenieka Ewing, Miss Turks and Caicos, and Amrita Thapar, Miss India (pictured) participated in an exercise demonstrating the
transmission of HIV before the 54th Miss Universe competition, in Bangkok, Thailand, last month.









New coordinator for GNP+
Twenty-eight-year-old Dutch activist Raoul Fransen (pictured) takes over as international
coordinator of the Global Network of People Living with HIV/Aids (GNP+) this month following the resignation of Stuart Flavell.
Fransen, from the Dutch Aids Fund, is a founder of Young Positives, a global network of HIV positive youths. GNP+ are running the 12th International Conference of People living with HIV/Aids
in October in Lima, Peru.
www.living2005.org
www.gnpplus.net





words
“If they come with the
attitude that I know they have today – of doing nothing – then stay at home, you’re not welcome. On the other hand, should you come with the intent to stop this open wound, you will be embraced and remembered throughout this century.”
Sir Bob Geldof addressing the Scottish Parliament about July’s G8 summit at Gleneagles.

“Sleeping with someone within three weeks of them being infected with HIV increases your risk of
contracting it from roughly one in 1,000 to one in 50.”
Claire Keeton, Sunday Times Johannesburg.

“It is something I just don’t think most people, straight or gay, pay much attention to – the responsibility we have of living in this world, of caring for ourselves and each other.”
Writer Larry Kramer on the dangers of barebacking, from the Dallas Morning News.

“Let’s hope that Pope Benedict XVI quickly realises that the worst sex scandal in the Catholic Church doesn’t involve predatory priests. Rather, it involves the Vatican’s hostility to condoms, which is creating more Aids orphans every day.”
Nicholas Kristof, from the New York Times.

“Crystal can make anybody a bottom. I’ve heard stories that even straight guys flip over on this stuff.”
Dennis deLeon, on how crystal meth is contributing to the Aids epidemic, from the New York Metro.