[Pharm-policy] Senegal: Call For Regional Manufacture Of AIDS Drugs

[James Love]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200009290299.html

Call For Regional Manufacture Of AIDS Drugs

Panafrican News Agency 
September 29, 2000 

Peter Masebu
Dakar, Senegal 

West and central African AIDS researchers were Friday challenged
to start thinking of manufacturing drugs to combat the incurable
disease at regional level.

The president of the West and Central African AIDS Research
Network, Prof. Souleymane Mboup denounced the total
dependence on the external world for AIDS drugs and reagents.

He was discussing recommendations of a three-day consultative
meeting on priorities of HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa, funded by
the US Rockefeller Foundation.

The Senegalese virologist commended Iranian scientists, who, in
the face of an American embargo, were locally making their own
AIDS drugs and reagents.

Mboup also called for immediate steps to train laboratory experts
who would scientifically monitor volunteers who will participate in
human trials of AIDS vaccine trials.

Another scientist, Dr Jean Gatorano, particularly called for
increased efforts to discover antiretrovirals designed to combat
HIV-2, which is rampant in West Africa.

"For the time being, the anti-AIDS medicine available is designed
to combat HIV-1, which is more virulent than HIV-2, which is
dominant in this region," Gatorama, a WHO technical adviser to
the Cape Verdian health ministry, said.

In his remarks, a representative of the African Network of people
Living With HIV/AIDS, Ali Ba, said that what was urgently needed
were drugs to treat opportunistic diseases such as diarrhoea and
skin diseases.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation representative, Dr. Tim
Evans, expressed his organisation's long-term goals was to
promote health equity so that African people with HIV/AIDS would
have access to antiretrovirals that are improving the living
conditions of patients in the developed North.

He said that since January, the Foundation has been consulting
African AIDS experts so as to come up with its own HIV/AIDS
programme for the continent.

    [snip]


Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea
Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and
Togo attended the consultative meeting.



-- 
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
v. 1.202.387.8030, fax 1.202.234.5176
love@cptech.org, http://www.cptech.org