VARIOUS FILE: Health groups call for an upgrade of AIDS treatment as AIDS approaches its thirtieth birthday

Record ID: 402662

  • Title: VARIOUS FILE: Health groups call for an upgrade of AIDS treatment as AIDS approaches its thirtieth birthday
  • Date: 7th June 2011
  • Summary: HARARE, ZIMBABWE (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF WOMEN LOOKING AT AIDS AND HIV AWARENESS POSTERS IN A CLINIC VARIOUS OF SIGNS PROMOTING MALE CIRCUMCISION AS A DEFENCE AGAINST HIV
  • Embargoed: 22nd June 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Sudan, Usa
  • City:
  • Country: Usa Sudan Zimbabwe Kenya India
  • Topics: History,Health
  • Reuters ID: LVAPGZICDW5F9SSW0NBDWJ8G00B
  • Story Text: June 8 will mark 30 years to the day since the first case of AIDS was officially diagnosed. In the three decades since then, the world has watched the disease mushroom from a rare illness to a global pandemic with a death toll of 25 million, and counting.
    Nowhere have the consequences been more widely felt than in sub-Saharan Africa where more people than anywhere else in the world have been affected by AIDS and HIV.
    While in some countries including Somalia and Senegal HIV prevalence is under one percent, in East African countries including Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania it is five percent and in Southern African countries it is between 10 and 17 percent.
    Life expectancy in the countries most heavily affected by the AIDS pandemic is now 52 years.
    But if the impact of AIDS' on Africa has been devastating, advances in treatment and education in the past few decades have also been promising.
    "We know that HIV treatment can help to save lives, so people living with HIV. We also know that it prevents illnesses of people living with HIV. The new evidence, however, coming out in the last year or so is that HIV treatment can also help to reduce new infections by up to 92 percent," says Sharonann Lynch HIV policy advisor at the international health organsiation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
    The organisation is one of several international health and welfare groups using the 30th anniversary of the diagnosis of AIDS to put the fight to eliminate the disease back at the top of the global agenda.
    Their message, Lynch says is as much about delivery of care as it is about advances in medical science.
    "We could and should make it easier on patients, so to look at some of the medicines that can be delivered in slower doses, that may be, whether in monthly injection, or some other sort of long-acting drug delivery system, such as a patch, could be an exciting opportunity to improve HIV care," she said.
    In Africa where many of the people most vulnerable to infection are also the continent's poorest, making medicine easier to access and more affordable could save thousands of lives.
    When it first emerged, Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) cost 10,000 US dollars per patient per year. Today, with the availability of affordable generic medicines that figure has dropped to a little over 100 US dollars, making treatment in developing nations more achievable than ever.
    But while costs have dropped competition between manufacturers has intensified. Protests in India and other countries fighting for the right to produce generic drugs have become the focus of the campaign to revolutionise the way AIDS is treated.
    "In pre-2000 area we were forced to tell patients in our clinics there are drugs to treat you but we cannot afford them. Today, 10 years down the line, we are having patients in our clinic again who have become now resistant to the drugs that are available at affordable prices and we're back into a situation for certain patients, we have to tell them, "look, there are drugs in the private sector, or in rich countries that could treat you, but we cannot afford them," said Gilles Van Cutsem, medical coordinator for MSF in South Africa.
    It's a conflict that goes right to the heart of the global pharmaceutical industry. The more ways are discovered to treat the pandemic, the more complex distribution and delivery of that treatment seems to become.
    But while thirty years on the debate on how to deal with AIDS is more heated than ever, on the ground in Africa, the effort to stop the spread of the disease has not lost momentum.
    Education is now seen as one of the major ways to improve people's chances of avoiding infection and helping those infected with HIV and AIDS.
    Zimbabwe's epidemic was one of the biggest in the world until the rate of people infected with HIV almost halved, from 29 percent of the population in 1997 to 16 percent in 2007. Progress, researchers for the medical journal PLoS Medicine said was thanks to a nationwide AIDS awareness program.
    Campaigners across Africa are now hoping to replicate that success in other countries.
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