Monday was World AIDS day.
WASHINGTON – Marking World AIDS Day, experts said Monday that the war on AIDS was being lost as U.S. and world health officials began a six-day tour of four AIDS-racked nations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Led by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and recently appointed U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall L. Tobias, the 80-person delegation will tour treatment facilities in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, where the AIDS epidemic continues to spread unabated.
“We appear to be losing the fight against AIDS at the moment,” Thompson said Monday from Zambia. “We need to redouble our efforts. This war has more casualties than any other war, as we are losing 3 million people every year.”
Despite billions of dollars pledged recently to fight the disease, many experts agree with Thompson that the war against AIDS isn’t going well.
Forty million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to a recent report by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, known as UNAIDS. This year alone, 5 million people were newly infected and 3 million – about 8,000 a day – have died from HIV/AIDS complications, the report found. Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most severely affected region, accounting this year for more than 3 million new infections – 60 percent of the world’s total – and 2.3 million deaths.
President Bush, on a campaign fund-raising swing Monday through Dearborn, Mich., noted in a statement issued by his press secretary that Africa bears the brunt of AIDS devastation.
“Today, more than 40 million people are living with HIV, including nearly 30 million in Africa,” Bush said in the statement. “Behind these staggering numbers are the names and faces of orphaned and suffering children, devastated communities and a continent in crisis.”
The disease also is spreading in India, Vietnam, China and Nepal as well as Latin America and the Caribbean.
Two international groups announced plans Monday to provide anti-retroviral AIDS/HIV treatments to 3 million patients in developing countries by the end of 2005. The so-called “3-by-5” plan, launched by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization, a separate U.N. agency, is a major step toward providing AIDS treatment to all who need it.
Of the estimated 5 million people who need HIV drugs, only about 400,000 receive them, according to the WHO, which on Monday approved three anti-retroviral treatment pills recommended for AIDS patients in poor nations. The medications, made by two generic-drug manufacturers in India, simplify AIDS therapies by combining three drugs into one pill that’s taken twice a day.
Brand pharmaceutical companies haven’t agreed to combine their medications into a single pill, according to WHO officials. Only generic manufacturers offer the so-called “fixed-dose combination” therapies that experts recommend for use in extremely poor countries.
On the eve of a trip to Uruguay to represent the United States at an international AIDS summit, U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told staff members at Health and Human Services headquarters Monday in Washington that America isn’t shirking its responsibilities in the global AIDS crisis.
“There are only two possible responses to suffering on this scale. We can turn our eyes away in resignation and despair, or we can take decisive, historic action to turn the tide against this disease and give the hope of life to millions who need our help now. The United States of America chooses the path of action and the path of hope,” Carmona said.
Experts on AIDS have applauded Bush’s plan to provide $15 billion to fund AIDS treatment, research and prevention over the next five years. The money is intended to prevent 7 million new HIV infections, treat at least 2 million people with life-extending drugs and provide care for 10 million AIDS-afflicted people.
Bush’s financial commitment and defined goals have mobilized much-needed political energy and public awareness behind AIDS, said Holly Burkhalter, the U.S. policy director for the Health Action AIDS Campaign, a Boston-based national group that urges U.S. health professionals to help stop the global AIDS crisis.
But Burkhalter worries that the Bush administration is hesitant to fund programs that study or combat the spread of AIDS and HIV among gays, intravenous drug users and prostitutes, three high-risk AIDS populations. In a letter to Tobias, who will oversee how the $15 billion in U.S. AIDS money is spent, about 150 leading health professionals sought assurances that America will continue to fund such programs.
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(c) 2003, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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GRAPHICS (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20031126 AIDS update, 20031127 US AIDS stats
AP-NY-12-01-03 1835EST
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