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South Africa
opened its first national AIDS conference
on
Sunday. Sixty-seven delegates, including
physicians, scientists and laboratory workers
from 16 African countries, the Caribbean and the
United States, gathered
in the
world’s most
heavily infected country to work out ways to
fight the deadly disease. The Joint United
Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said,
“HIV/AIDS represents a severe development crisis
in sub-Saharan Africa, the worst-affected
region in the world. Even if exceptionally
effective prevention, treatment and care programmes take hold immediately, the scale of
the epidemic means that the human and
socio-economic toll
will be massive for many
generations.”
The latest report by the International HIV/AIDS
group advocates a three-fold increase in funding
to US$5,7 billion by 2005 to help reverse the
global AIDS epidemic.
The report, released
before the international AIDS conference in
Durban, says donor governments should increase
spending on HIV prevention to 0.02% of their
national gross domestic product. According to
UNAIDS,
one in every 11 adults in the sub-Saharan
African region is infected with the virus. The
report states that although Uganda, Senegal,
Zambia and other African countries have made
enormous strides against the epidemic, many of
the people who are exposed to the highest risk
of infection cannot obtain the support needed to
change their behaviour in order to avoid
exposure to HIV. It says current donor
contributions are only enough to provide roughly
three condoms per year for every adult man in
the region.
Prevention strategies will be most successful if
the region addresses the social and economic
conditions that accentuate vulnerability to HIV.
“Limited educational opportunities for girls,
for example, are directly correlated with higher
teen pregnancy rates and earlier initiation of
sexual activity…Where a woman’s economic
security depends on a man, she may be less able
to negotiate condom use during sex,” the report
says.
“From a societal standpoint,” the report states,
“countries that are too poor to support even a
minimal health-care infrastructure are unlikely
to have the wherewithal to provide VCT
(voluntary counselling and testing), STD
diagnosis and treatment, or PMTCT.” According to
Botswana’s local government minister, the AIDS
pandemic is being worsened by the flight of many
health professionals to other continents. “The
movement of health professionals and scientists
in search of greener pastures has unfortunately
for us depleted our scarce human resource and
has left many of our countries in dire need of
these health professionals.” From a global view,
the report recommends increased spending on
prevention and a dramatic scaling up of all
HIV/AIDS efforts. Annual spending on treatment
for opportunistic infections should increase to
US $2,6 billion
by 2005, while annual outlays
on
antiretroviral treatment should grow to US $1,9
billion. Programmes to support
AIDS orphans will
require at least US $1 billion annually. Donors,
in collaboration with multilateral agencies,
should provide extensive additional support to
build long-term human capacity and
infrastructure. A sustained effort should be
made to improve data collection on the epidemic.
The first HIV/AIDS vaccine trials in South
Africa will commence in the next few weeks. So
far 150 volunteers have come forward – the first
12 will be injected three times with low doses
of the vaccine at four-week intervals. With
testing already under way in Uganda, this is the
first human testing of an AIDS vaccine based
exclusively on the C-strain of HIV, which occurs
predominantly in southern Africa. Josephine
Birungi, a senior scientist at the Uganda Virus
Research Institute, said: “The vaccine we are
using
is a piece of an HIV virus, but they have
made it synthetically.
In other words we are
working with an artificial piece of the DNA that
is inserted into a plasma to form the vaccine
which is then injected into the volunteer.”
Scientists are adamant the tests are safe. In
answer to the most frequently asked question
they claim that volunteers cannot get HIV from
the vaccine. A complete trial takes up to nine
years with no guarantee of success. Currently
more than 40 million people around the world are
living with HIV. |
