Oh dear oh dear, said some of PN's staff, looking at this month's issue, and particularly the cover feature. Gloom and misery everywhere. Millions dying of Aids while the politicians sit on their wallets. Greedy drug companies more worried about the chairman's Merc than saving lives. Delay, wrangling and confusion while millions die...
Yes, we wanted to give certain politicians and companies a good kicking to get them to fund global Aids treatment programmes better. But that's precisely because those programmes have started to work. We must not lose the impetus now.
Fast-track, user-controlled projects, of the sort The Global Fund was set up to back, are slowly starting to wedge open the coffin in which Africa's HIV positive people seemed to have been laid.
So here are a few pieces of good news.
Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, returned from Kenya singing the praises of its new government and president, Mwai Kibaki. "It is hard to convey the startlingly changed atmosphere," said Lewis, singling out for recognition the president's decision to waive primary school fees so that destitute Aids orphans could attend.
Kenya will soon have 10,000 people on anti-retrovirals, 3,000 more than previously thanks to an added $56 million from The Global Fund. That's five per cent of those who need them - not enough, but a start.
Another country to break the five per cent treatment barrier is Botswana. In the world's most afflicted country, the HIV prevalence among pregnant women has at last begun to fall.
Even the erratic South African government has developed an initiative along with Ethiopia to become the first two African governments producing their own HIV treatments. As we go to press, The Global Fund is waiting, pens in hand, to rush over again to Johannesburg and sign a deal to give South Africa $72 million for Aids despite bizarre power struggles that recently stymied the deal at the last minute.
Even the 'evil drug companies' are trying very hard to send the right signals. GSK recently cut the price of Combivir - one of the most overpriced HIV pills when it first appeared - to £206 a year. Not enough if we want truly global treatment, but a step in the right direction.
This is exactly why the momentum towards global treatment must be kept up. We don't care who signs the cheques, whether it's Clare Short's replacement, George Bush, or Bono. But, as Global Fund director Richard Feachem says, for countries to pull out of funding commitments now would be as immoral as - well, as invading Iraq without helping to rebuild it.
As if to remind us of how far we have to go, we recently got a letter from an old friend. PN interviewed dynamic young Ugandan Aids activist Solomon Kapere in March 2001. At that time he was already looking for HIV treatment.
He still hasn't found it.
Solomon drops us an email, delighted he's been funded to go to the International Aids Conference in Paris in July. Well deserved too for such a committed volunteer community activist. But Solomon's main point in writing is: "To help me to get anti-retrovirals. My CD4 count as of now is 102 and I am concerned for my health."
The point about this is not to make an appeal on behalf of one particular activist. People need properly funded and continuous treatment, not dribs and drabs of drugs sent out of pity.
It's to show that someone who in the UK would probably have been on combination therapy for years is, because he was born elsewhere, still staring death in the face. People like Solomon are the reason we continue to campaign for global Aids treatment.
