‘Three million on HIV drugs by 2005’ - new WHO chiefThe new director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has promised that they will provide antiretroviral drugs to three million people with HIV in poor countries by 2005. Dr Jong-Wook Lee (with former WHO chief and former Norwegian Prime Minister Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland) made the pledge on his first day in office and assured listeners that supplying the drugs in Africa was a realistic goal. He said that a new global Aids plan would be announced on World Aids Day in December. “We must do the right things. We must do them in the right places. And we must do them straight away,” Dr Lee told WHO staff. |
Ex-South African President Nelson Mandela, at the Aids Society Conference in Paris, criticised the developed world for not doing enough to fight Aids in Africa. But he also criticised the performance of African countries, including his own.
Mandela said: “Science has given us the tools to fight Aids, but the problem is that the world is not using them where they are needed most.
“We must dramatically extend prevention efforts,” he continued. “But our biggest failure is the one to provide life-saving treatments to the people that need them.
“We are convinced that the Global Fund is the right multilateral partnership to fight Aids.”
However he criticised African nations for not doing enough to combat the Aids pandemic that is cutting swathes through the continent. He praised Uganda, Senegal and Botswana for developing innovative anti-HIV programmes.
But in a coded attack on his successor, South African President Thabo Mbeki, he said: “Some of the countries most affected have not done nearly enough to fight HIV/Aids. This is a travesty of human rights. We know such countries are poor, but failing to fight HIV/Aids will only make them poorer.
“The result will be calamitous, not just for us, but for the whole developing world.”
He said that his own Nelson Mandela Foundation had set up a campaign to persuade people to ‘devote a minute of your life to HIV’, adding: “This is my way of working with the Global Fund. What will yours be?”
 photo: gus cairns Protesters at the Aids Conference in Paris demanding that rich western countries donate the promised $10 billion to the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria. |
As he finished his speech Mandela was joined on stage by demonstrators chanting “Treat the six million - where’s the $10 billion?”
As we went to press, the South African Medical Control Council proposed banning the use of nevirapine for preventing mother-to-child transmission on safety grounds. This is despite the fact that evidence shows that the drug is not only safe but also prevents at least half of HIV transmissions to babies.
Protesters jeered South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang at the opening of the country’s first national conference on HIV and Aids in Durban in early August.
“We have never said we don’t need antiretroviral drugs,” the minister told the BBC. “The issue has been the cost.”
An estimated five million South Africans have HIV and over 600 people in the country die from Aids-related complications each day. Gus Cairns
If the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria does not get the $3bn it needs in order to finance its third round of grants this October, it may be reduced to begging for emergency top-up money.
 Dr Jeffrey Sachs: “We should allocate grants anyway” |
Professor Richard Feachem, Fund Director, made his dire prediction at a special Donors’ Conference in Paris in July to coincide with the International Aids Society Conference.
He said: “If we are underfunded by October, one possibility is to go back to the donors and say, ‘Will you specifically fund the very high-quality proposals for Aids, TB and malaria treatment and care we have received this time?’”
The Global Fund, set up to combat diseases that kill six million people a year, faces a shortfall of $3bn out of the $7bn developing countries have applied for this October.
The Fund has approved grants totalling $1.5 billion to pay for 155 projects in 90 countries, spending 60 per cent of its money in Africa and 60 per cent on HIV.
Fund chairman and former US Trade Secretary, Tommy Thompson, maintained that the USA had already done more than its fair share: “The USA has donated 43 per cent of the cash and 50 per cent of the pledges to the Fund. President George Bush has pledged a total of $15bn to fight Aids.”
But major EU donors have not pledged additional money. French President Jacques Chirac has offered to triple his country’s contribution to $300m, but claims from countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark that they could not afford more money for HIV/Aids have meant that the EU as a whole has contributed only $600m this year - half of what it should do proportionately to match the US $1bn.
Harvard economist Dr Jeffrey Sachs, one of the Fund’s originators, commented: “If the $3bn is not found by October we should go ahead and allocate grants anyway in order to shame the donor countries.”
“The US pledge of $15bn, if it appears, will operate in only 14 countries and will do what such programmes always do: finance pet projects that are politically motivated and fall below the radar of public scrutiny.
“Countries like the US and the UK have failed miserably to actually treat people dying of Aids. A maximum of 3,000 to 4,000 people have been treated as a result of programmes funded by bilateral agencies such as USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID).
“George W Bush does not like multilateral programmes like the Fund, and his advisers have told me openly that this is because he can’t fire the CEO if he wants to.”
Sachs warned that even Bush’s promises may be more appearance than reality. “We’re in spin world here,” he said. “In the US the White House and Congress continue to be locked in a battle over whether to give $1bn to the Fund.”
Meanwhile, the new Under Secretary of State at the Department for International Development has denied that Britain’s contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria is “pathetic”.
Questioned by Positive Nation at the Houses of Parliament in July, Gareth Thomas MP said that Britain would donate an extra £80m from 2006 to 2008 to the Fund on top of the £200m already committed for 2002 to 2006.
Mr Thomas said the Fund needed to show it was using public money effectively but added that the UK government was supportive of the long-term future of the Fund.
Indian politicians light the light for Aids
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India’s main opposition leader Sonia Gandhi lights the lamp as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee looks on during the inauguration of the National Conference on HIV/Aids in New Delhi at the end of July. The meeting was held to raise awareness about the disease in India, which has become the world’s second largest-affected country with more than 4.5 million people carrying the virus. Sonia Gandhi said: “While Indian companies are world leaders in the manufacture of anti-Aids drugs...India does not have drug therapy as part of its Aids programme.”