Jason Gould comes out as HIV positive
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Evidence that Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) can work in some of the poorest countries of the world was presented at Boston during the 10th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in February.
Getting HAART to people who live in the most basic of surroundings is now a priority, former US President Bill Clinton told the conference, and experiences in Haiti and Malawi now show it is possible.
Dr Paul Farmer presented remarkable proof that antiretroviral therapy is feasible in rural Haiti. He compared 100 patients on antiretrovirals with a second group of 100 people with HIV who did not receive HAART but did receive the same package of services (TB prevention, antibiotics and free care), and a third group of 100 patients who just received free care whenever they showed up.
 Dr William Rodriguez with a CD4 tester photo: gus cairns |
For the 100 patients receiving HAART none died during the two-year study, compared with 11 in the second group and 24 in the third.
"This is despite the fact that we only treated the very sickest people with HAART," said Farmer. "We called them the BIOS group - Brought In On Stretchers."
Meanwhile, Dr Mina Hosseinipour reported her experiences in Malawi, a country of 10 million people, of whom almost one million are infected with HIV and where personal income is around £140 a year.
Last year, 540 people at Dr Hosseinipour's hospital - 20 per cent of whom had CD4 counts under 10 - received HAART.
"What's striking," she told the conference, "is the patients who began the therapy have done amazingly well - if they were able to remain in care."
The goal of the Malawi government is to scale up the availability of HAART and Dr Hosseinipour conceded of the early results, "It's a start."
CD4 cell counts cost as much as a month of HAART in many developing countries. So the news that a low-cost simple, portable device for measuring CD4s using the "same technology that goes into your digital camera," also comes as welcome news.
According to Dr. William Rodriguez, of Harvard Medical School, each test performed by the prototype device will cost about £2 and only take about 10 minutes using one drop of blood.
More importantly, it will cost as little as £400, compared with hospital-based machines that range from £20,000 to £50,000 each. Edwin J Bernard
Bono asks people around the world not to forget
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The shortfall in donations to the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria could mean that it is doomed to failure.
President Bush has committed $1 billion to the Fund, out of the $15 billion promised in his State of the Union address, but nothing at all until 2004. And lower than expected pledges from the other G8 countries means that the Fund could well run out of money as soon as next year.
Britain's contribution of $200 million over five years was dismissed as "a laughable response" by Jeff O'Malley, executive director of the International HIV/Aids Alliance, speaking to a meeting of MP's and peers last month.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Aids (APPG - Aids) heard that so far the Fund has awarded grants to 160 programmes in 80 countries with 60 per cent of the money going to Aids and 60 per cent of the money going to Africa.
The first round of grants from the fund, approved in April last year, totalled $616 million followed by a further $800 million approved this January.
But the $2.2 billion so far pledged to the Fund falls considerably short of the $10 billion a year that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has requested.
Although officially the British government is committed to the success of the Fund, Whitehall insiders have told Positive Nation that Department for International Development (DfID) is determined to do away with it.
Departmental officials have stressed that DfID is committed to other health projects and that it is nonsensical for the Global Fund to try and do everything.
Jeff O'Malley was a little more circumspect in front of the MPs: "There is a perception that Clare Short is less than truly supportive of the Global Fund."
"However, the fact that the Fund has raised so much money in such a short period of time is remarkable," he added diplomatically.
Bernard Rivers, editor of Fund Observer, told the MPs and peers that he didn't think the US would give any more to the Fund until other rich nations do.
The Fund now only has $200 million left in the bank, he said, and needs to find hundreds of millions more in order to give grants promised this October.
So far the Fund has been given money and hasn't fundraised anything, Rivers said; it will have to apply strong pressure on rich western governments to back it or it could be doomed to early failure.
New HIV and Aids campaigns in the USA are being specifically targeted at African Americans after latest figures show that the disease disproportionately affects them.
The latest figures from the Center for Disease control (CDC) show that 54 per cent of new HIV infections were among black Americans even though they only form 13 per cent of the population. About a third of new infections in men were due to sexual contact between black men.
Reports of new HIV infections and cases of Aids have also risen for the first time in a decade in the US.
Dr Ron Valdiserri of CDC, told the recent Retrovirus conference in Boston that there was an eight per cent increase in the number of HIV cases between 1999 and 2001. "We have seen a 14 per cent increase in HIV diagnoses over a two year period in men who have sex with men and a 10 per cent increase in heterosexual transmissions," he said.
Between 850,000 and 950,000 Americans are now living with HIV.
New US HIV and Aids campaigns are being aimed at women and African Americans. This poster was photographed at Staten Island in New York photo: martin flynn |
Campaigns are being aimed at black American men who have sex with men after federal research revealed that out of a group of 5,500 of them 14 per cent were both HIV positive and either did not regard themselves as 'gay' or did not admit it.
Among campaigns being launched at US African Americans this spring are a GlaxoSmithKline campaign featuring the openly HIV positive basketball star Magic Johnson as well as church and government TV, poster and print awareness efforts.
New US HIV and Aids campaigns are being aimed at women and African Americans. This poster was photographed at Staten Island in New York.
Jason
Gould (pictured), the son of Barbra Streisand's first marriage to Elliott Gould,
has been diagnosed HIV positive after being admitted to hospital in Los Angeles
with chicken pox, the US press is reporting. Gould, aged 38, has never hidden
his homosexuality and has been working as both an actor and director in Hollywood
for several years.
Rock
star Bono of U2 (pictured) has called on millions of people to take to the streets
to draw attention to the victims of Africa's "forgotten" war against Aids. Speaking
after receiving an Irish Music Award in Dublin for his work on behalf of the world's
poor, Bono said: "While I'm inspired to see people out on the streets to defend
the potential loss of life in Iraq, two million Africans will die next year and
the year after because they cannot get hold of medicine."