From Africa Recovery, New Releases, October 2003

Africa Recovery, New York -- Declaring the inability of the poor to obtain HIV/AIDS medications "a global health emergency," the Director-General of WHO, the World Health Organization, Dr. Lee Jong-wook, announced plans to provide life-saving anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) to 3 million people by the end of 2005, including 2 million in Africa. Only 50,000 of the estimated 30 million Africans infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS have access to ARVs, which have dramatically reduced fatalities in wealthy countries. The announcement of the "3 x 5 campaign", came at a press conference at United Nations headquarters in New York on 22 September as heads of state and government gathered for the opening of the General Assembly. Dr. Lee was joined by Dr. Peter Piot, the head of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and Dr. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM).

The campaign will be modelled after the emergency response to the SARS epidemic, a highly infectious respiratory disease that was quickly contained by a massive and coordinated global effort earlier this year. Emergency response teams will be dispatched to the worst-affected countries to assist local authorities establish testing, distribution, and treatment facilities, while experts at WHO develop standardized and simplified treatment protocols, training programmes and a quality control facility for the massive quantities of medications required. The cost of the campaign was put at $10 billion by WHO spokesman Ian Simmons, about double the current levels of spending on the disease in developing countries. Details of the 3 x 5 campaign will be released on 1 December, World AIDS Day.

Financing, noted Dr. Feachem, is expected to come from three main sources -- the Global Fund, the World Bank's $500 million AIDS fund and the United States, which announced earlier this year that it would provide $15 billion over 5 years to combat the disease. Prices for ARVS and other AIDS-related medicines have dropped sharply in recent years amid bitter battles over patent rights and global trading rules. The cost of patented versions of ARV drugs, which ran as high as $15,000 annually, are now available through generic suppliers for as low as a dollar a day.

Whether funding for the 3 x 5 campaign will actually come through however, remains an open question. No major pledges have been made for the new campaign, and support for existing HIV/AIDS financing mechanisms have fallen far short of expectations. The Global Fund, established last year by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to underwrite HIV/AIDS programmes in developing countries, has less than $700 million committed towards its $3 billion budget for 2004, and the amount and timing of US funding, in the face of domestic budget pressures and the rising cost of the war in Iraq, is uncertain.

Globally, an estimated 42 million people are thought to carry the virus, all but 2 million of them in developing countries. About 6 million people currently require ARVS, which are prescribed to those in the late stages of the disease. "To deliver anti-retroviral treatment to the millions who need it we must change the way we think and change the way we act," said Dr. Lee. "Business as usual will not work. Business as usual means watching thousands of people die every single day."

The disease, which destroys the body's natural defences against infection, has killed at least 20 million people worldwide since it was first identified in the United States in the early 1980s. Most deaths have been in African and other developing countries, where poverty, weak public health systems and the high cost of the drugs have allowed the disease to spread untreated. "The HIV pandemic is the greatest disaster is recorded human history and we have spent the first two decades of this pandemic sitting on our hands," said Dr. Feachem. "The world now is poised to launch a large scale counterattack against the pandemic."

The failure of wealthy countries to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS among the poor was angrily attacked by the UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, Ambassador Stephen Lewis on 21 September. Speaking at a continental AIDS conference in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Lewis noted that Northern countries had already spent over $200 billion on the war against terrorism, "but we can't find the money to provide anti-retroviral treatment for all those who need such treatment in Africa This double standard," he said, "is the grotesque obscenity of the modern world."

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