SPAIN: More than 16,000 experts, activists and members of NGOs meeting this week in Barcelona have made an urgent call for more funds to combat the AIDS pandemic, which is expected to cost 70 million lives over the next 20 years.
The delegates at the 14th International Conference on AIDS, which was inaugurated yesterday by the Infanta Elena of Spain, will read and listen to 14,000 studies and papers on AIDS, all of which make for depressing reading.
It is estimated that some 20 million people have died of the disease since the first case was detected in 1981. There are believed to be 40 million seropositive cases currently in the world, and five million new cases were infected in 2001.
There has been little progress in controlling the disease, particularly in Africa, since the last AIDS conference in Durban two years ago. Seventy per cent of HIV-positive cases are in Africa, where the epidemic is almost out of control. "Fewer than 2 per cent of AIDS cases in Africa have access to any drug treatment," said Dr Ana Serra of Médecins sans Frontières as she arrived at the conference yesterday,.
Only 3.5 per cent of HIV cases are in developed nations and those with stable economies, where numbers of new cases have stabilised and life expectancy rate of seropositive cases is increasing.
This is partly due to better education and a greater knowledge of how to prevent the disease and almost general access to treatment. The UNAIDS organisation estimates that only 550,000 of the 40 million HIV-positive cases are in Europe, 950,000 in North America, 15,000 in Australia and Oceania.
Dr Jordi Casabona, co-chairman of this week's conference says: "With efficient therapy and the correct retroviral treatment an HIV-positive patient can live for many years with no symptoms and with a virtually normal quality of life."
Dr Pilar Estebanez, an AIDS and humanitarian aid specialist described the situation as "a disgrace, and one of the greatest failures of our time". She warns of the serious effects the epidemic will have in many countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, where life expectancy has already fallen from 62 to only 47.
"Almost half the young people in Africa who are now around 15 will be dead before they reach 50. This will have incalculable repercussions in those societies," she says. "The fall in life expectancy has destroyed many years of effort to improve health in these countries through vaccination and health education," says Dr Casabona..
Two years ago, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan , called for $10,000 million in financing from richer countries to fight the disease in poor and underdeveloped nations. Yesterday NGO representatives claimed that less than 30 per cent of this money had in fact been raised.
They also blame multinational drug companies for maintaining high prices for retroviral drugs, protecting their patents and refusing to allow the production of cheaper generic retroviral drugs.
Although some companies have signed bilateral agreements with certain countries, experts say this is totally insufficient. "The current prices are way beyond the reach of millions of patients in many African, Eastern European and Asian nations," complained an Intermon/Oxfam spokeswoman yesterday. Experts have also expressed their concern at the increase in the number of cases in certain Latin American countries, and for the first time they are well represented at this conference.
Dr Casabona, the co-chairman of the Barcelona conference, said that reform of drug pricing was one of the major aims of the conference. "We will work towards unified prices for different zones, with important discounts "if we can reach agreements between UNAIDS agency and the drug laboratories we will have won a new battle in the war," he said.
AFP adds: The South African Health Minister, Ms Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, said yesterday that her government would uphold a court ruling requiring it to make anti-HIV drugs available to all pregnant women to prevent the AIDS virus from infecting their babies. "We dare not disappoint all South Africans who want to be obedient citizens of our country," she said.