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E-DRUG: Africa urges wealthy countries to make AIDS drugs available,
affordable
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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 criticised 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.
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