From Africa Recovery, Vol.15#4 (December 2001), Briefs page

AIDS drug access and funding top Africa's concerns

Access to medications and increased funding for HIV/AIDS education and prevention dominated the 9-13 December International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Africa, held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. It is vital to "ensure that people living with HIV/AIDS in the South can have ... access to medication, whether the drugs are copies or originals," Burkina's President Blaise Compaoré told the delegates.

Other speakers called for dramatic increases in overall funding for AIDS programmes in Africa. "Scaling down the disease can only take place by scaling up the resources," declared Mr. Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. According to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), $5 bn is needed every year to control the pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, but so far countries have pledged only one-tenth of that amount. Dr. Ibrahim N'doye of Senegal, president of the African Union Against Sexually Transmitted Diseases, said that the world's response to the AIDS crisis in Africa should be as great as its reaction to the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York.

According to UNAIDS, some 2.3 million people died of AIDS in Africa alone last year, and approximately 28 million Africans are HIV-positive. The scale of this crisis, said UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, demands urgency. "Turning back the epidemic requires nothing more and nothing less than keeping the commitments that governments have made in the past year.... It is time now to turn those commitments into action."

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