[Pharm-policy] African perspectives on funding for HIV treatments

[James Love]

This story, posted on healthgap by Richard Jefferys, gives African perspectives
on the funding of HIV/AIDS treatments.  The most quotable comments were
from Dr. Timothy Stamps, the Zimbabwe health minister, who compared the
proposal for new aid to the estimated $600 billion the west spent on
the Y2k computer bug.  

  Jamie

http://www.vancouversun.com/cgi-bin/newsite.pl?adcode=w-mm&modulename=world%
20news&template=international&nkey=vs&filetype=fullstory&file=/cpfs/world/00
0111/w011114.htmlLast updated: Tuesday 11 January 2000

Vancouver Sun: WORLD NEWS

Africa urges wealthy countries to make AIDS drugs available, affordable

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - African countries say wealthy countries should make
HIV-fighting drugs available and affordable to residents of the continent,
which has been hardest hit by AIDS yet has virtually no access to
treatments saving lives in the industrial world.

Many African health ministers and ambassadors attending a meeting of the
Security Council on Monday applauded a new initiative by the United States
to increase funding for AIDS prevention programs and vaccine research.

At the meeting, U.S. Vice-President Al Gore announced that the White House
was seeking an extra $150 million this year from Congress for vaccine
research and prevention programs in Africa.

African officials, however, said more money was needed, and that wealthy
countries had an ethical imperative to give Africans access to HIV-fighting
drugs.

"It is immoral that the worst affected continent has the lowest access to
care," said Namibia's health minister, Dr. Libertine Amathila.

Many patents for HIV-fighting drugs are held by Western pharmaceutical
companies, which have lobbied to block cheaper, generic versions from being
manufactured. That has kept effective yet expensive drugs such as AZT and
their generic versions out of the hands of most Africans.

Zimbabwe's health minister, Dr. Timothy Stamps, said withholding such drugs
constituted a violation of Africans' basic human rights - the right to
health. And he questioned whether the practice was a result of sheer
ignorance or a "new form of racial discrimination, another ethnic cleansing
process."

Stamps was similarly incredulous that the industrial world had just spent
what he said was $600 billion US to ward off the Y2K computer bug "to
eliminate the risk of some people losing some money, some places losing
some data and some people disrupting their busy schedules."

"To some of us in the real world, this only induces a sense of wonder that
intelligent beings in the metropolitan countries can be so oblivious, so
colour blind, to what has happened in the African continent over the past
15 years," he said.

AIDS is now the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where
poverty and wars have already taken a heavy toll. In 1998, 200,000 people
died as a result of armed conflicts in Africa, compared with 2.2 million
from AIDS.

An estimated 23.3 million Africans are currently infected with HIV or AIDS.

"War fuels the epidemic," Dr. Peter Piot, head of the joint UN Program on
HIV/AIDS, told the council in its first meeting ever on a health issue.
"But undoubtedly the epidemic itself is now . . . causing social and
economic crises which in turn threaten political stability."

According to UN statistics, $165 million was spent on AIDS prevention in
Africa in 1996, while estimates suggest that between $800 million and $2.5
billion a year is needed to mount effective prevention campaigns on the
continent.

The United States alone spends $10 billion annually in public and private
money for AIDS research, prevention, care and treatment for the 40,000
people infected in America every year, the UN Development Program says.

The AIDS activist group ACT-UP said the U.S. should allow poor countries
access generic drugs that could reduce the cost of HIV-fighting medicines
by as much as 90 per cent.

ACT-UP similarly criticized Gore's $150 million spending announcement as a
"drop in the funding bucket."

Gore's appearance at the United Nations also drew some questions from
reporters about whether the vice-president was merely bolstering his
campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president by announcing some
new U.S. initiatives.











----------------------------
AIDS Treatment Data Network
611 Broadway, Suite #613
New York, NY 10012
Tel: (800) 734-7104
Fax: (212) 260-8869
E-mail: network@atdn.org
Internet: aidsinfonyc.org/network

Affilation provided for purpose of identification, not representation.



-- 
James Love
http://www.cptech.org
mailto:love@cptech.org
voice 1.202.387.8030