Lorna Mlosana, a 21-year-old volunteer with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), was gang-raped and then beaten to death outside a Cape Town township bar last month. TAC head Zackie Achmat, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, said: “Lorna was one of the most unbelievable volunteers. It is a terrible loss to her family, but also to us.”
A climbdown by two massive pharmaceutical manufacturers will allow cheap generic antiretrovirals in South Africa and offers hope to some of the five million people with the virus in the country. The news follows a long-running legal battle between pharmacos GlaxoSmithKline and Boehringer Ingelheim and treatment activists over drug patent rights. The move now makes possible access to a triple combination therapy for as little as $140 per patient per year.
The Red Cross has launched a programme to treat its own staff and volunteers with HIV. The organisation estimates that it has as many as 200,000 workers with the disease, out of some 97 million staff and helpers worldwide. “We can’t do our work without keeping these people alive,” said Bernard Gardiner, head of the charity’s Aids campaign.
Promises by the Indian Health Minister to provide free antiretroviral drugs to 100,000 people with the virus in 2004 are being stalled because of a dispute over prices with the country’s generic manufacturers. Sushma Swarji announced last month that the government would provide free anti-HIV drugs to all HIV positive new parents and all children under 15 in six states of the country most affected by the disease. But Dr Yusuf Hamied, chairman and managing director of Cipla Pharmaceuticals, said: “If the government wants to buy, they must let us know for how many, when, and do they have the money.” UNAIDS estimates put the number of people in India with HIV close to 5 million but the US Center for Strategic Studies predicts as many as 25 million Indians will be infected by 2010.
“Millions
of people with HIV/Aids are in danger of being reduced to mere numbers.”
Nelson Mandela.
“Our drugs don’t work on most patients.”
Allen Roses, vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK).
“Why is the NHS paying over £7 billion a year for drugs that don’t
work?”
Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal
(BMJ).
“Londoners living with HIV contribute to our city’s daily life
through their work, their roles as parents, family members, friends and carers,
often against the background of significant hardship and periods of illness.”
Ken Livingstone.
“In the UK we have benefited enormously from the contribution of people
living with HIV in developing our response to the epidemic.”
British PM, Tony Blair.
“There is a risk that compulsory screening of migrants for TB
and HIV could cause people who knew they were infected to go underground. If
anything, this would merely increase the risk of infection spreading.”
From a report written by the Institute for Public
Policy Research, an independent think tank on social policy.
“What will it do to doctors and nurses to offer two different levels
of care to patients, one of which will inevitably kill them at some point?”
The THT’s Lisa Power on the impact of the new
NHS regulations, which deny HIV treatment to visitors.
