Photos by Alex Caballero
 Stop Aids Campaign demo outside the London World Aids Day press conference |
In an apparent change of heart for the British government, the new Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, has backed moves to get cheap anti-retroviral drugs to millions of people living with HIV and Aids.
Benn supported plans by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to get three million people with HIV on treatments by 2005 at a cost of £10 billion a year.
The DfID minister defended the British government’s contributions to fight HIV and Aids in a combative style at a press conference to mark World Aids Day.
 Dr Peter Piot of UNAIDS |
Insisting that the UK was now the second biggest contributor to the Global Fund, after the USA, and to multinational and bilateral HIV projects in developing countries, Mr Benn said that Britain’s foreign funding on Aids had gone up sevenfold since Labour came to power in 1997.
Under Clare Short, the former DfID minister, the UK backed prevention of HIV but did not support treatment programmes.
Professor Richard Feachem, Director of The Global Fund, praised Hilary Benn.
He said: “There is a quite different tone to that of the previous two ministers. No more ‘we are reserving our judgement on the Fund pending a review’. Now ‘we are partners with the fund and will collaborate on ensuring its effectiveness’.”
DfID was no longer insisting on its own criteria for measuring success, he added.
 Dr Jack Chow of the World Health Organisation (WHO) |
However he expressed concern that the world market could be flooded with fake HIV drugs because of the rush to get three million people on to treatment by 2005.
“What we’re going to see is a lot of bogus drugs in the ‘3 by 5’ initiative,” Feachem said, “and we’ll need to educate people to stop this happening.”
At the moment only 300,000 people in the developing world who need antiretrovirals actually get them, the WHO says. But generic drug manufacturers in India have announced that they can now make an effective three- drug combination in one pill, to be taken twice a day, for less than $150 per patient per year.
 Hillary Benn MP, Secretary of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) |
UNAIDS has announced that over 40 million people worldwide are now living with the virus and over three million, or 8,000 a day, died from the disease in 2002.
Dr Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, told the press that last year another five million people were infected with the virus around the world.
“The face of Aids is now a young woman living with HIV in Africa,” he said, “and not a white middle class gay man living in the west.”
Dr Jack Chow, of the WHO, claimed: “Aids is now the disease of mass destruction,” and said that developing countries are now “Aids imploding countries,” because of the devastation to human life and economies by the epidemic.
Asking everyone to push for action now, Dr Chow said: “There is no more compelling health mission than the WHO ‘3 by 5’ campaign.”
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria is winning its case for funding from world’s rich countries, the Fund’s director, Richard Feachem, told a meeting of UK campaigning organisations just before World Aids Day.
“The problem now is to make sure the work gets done,” he said.
Feachem said that Aids programmes in many countries now were no longer being delayed by lack of funding - they had the money. It was political strife, bureaucracy and inertia that were holding them up in many cases.
Feachem gave the example of Sri Lanka. “We funded a superb HIV programme there,” he said. “But the president is now doing what he can to wreck it because it is in the separatist, Tamil north of the country.”
 photo: courtesy unaids |
Governments such as India and Kenya were often reluctant to give control over to voluntary organisations, he added, even though the latter were often more efficient.
In other cases the politicking only started when the money was on the table.
“An application to the Fund may say, for instance, ‘Ugandans collectively agree that this is how the fight against HIV/Aids should best be done’. But of course they don’t agree. There’s a lot of money to argue over.”
Nonetheless, Feachem added, the Fund still faces huge challenges in raising the amounts of money needed.
He said: “We are currently deciding on what our ‘cruising altitude’ should be - the cash the Fund can realistically expect each year, every year, for programmes that in some countries may need decades of support.”
The funding requirement for 2004 is $1.56bn, but because there are two grant rounds in 2005, the requirement for that year more than doubles to $3.58bn, as new projects are funded on top of ongoing ones.
Speaking on the BBC later, Mr Feacham questioned the effectiveness of safer sex campaigns in the 1990s. He said that condom messages needed to be aimed more at mobile male populations, such as truck drivers and soldiers. The predatory sexual behaviour of older men was the cause of the huge increase in HIV among young girls and women, he said.
“The great engine of the epidemic is mobile men,” he stressed. GC/MF
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