Healthy Skepticism Library item: 779

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Publication type: news

Naik G.
More AIDS Drugs Get to the Poor
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 2005 Jan 27

Full text:

The U.S. government and major health agencies reported encouraging results in the global push to provide antiviral drugs to desperately sick AIDS patients in developing countries, allaying earlier fears that key targets wouldn’t be met.

Officials from the U.S. government, the United Nations and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said yesterday that 700,000 AIDS patients in poor countries now are on life-prolonging drugs, an increase of 75% over the past 12 months and a jump from 440,000 patients in July 2004.

The increase was attributed to a big push by some governments to increase the number of urban and rural treatment centers where AIDS drugs are dispensed. In Africa, the hardest-hit region, the number of patients on AIDS drugs has more than doubled to 310,000 in the past year, officials said.

Countries such as Botswana, Burundi and Ivory Coast were singled out as among those that had made unexpected progress.

“We’re happy and surprised that things are moving so well,” said Jim Kim, a senior official at the World Health Organization. The U.N. agency, which has been criticized in the past for failing to stem the epidemic, is spearheading a plan known as “three-by-five” to supply AIDS drugs to three million people by the end of 2005.

Speaking to reporters in a conference call from the Davos World Economic Forum, the officials conceded that the biggest challenges still lie ahead. More than 40 million people are infected with HIV, of whom about six million will die premature deaths unless they get access to life-prolonging drugs. Several countries with large HIV-infected populations — especially India, Nigeria and South Africa — have yet to respond forcefully to the crisis, the officials said. And health agencies still face financing shortfalls: The WHO needs another $2 billion this year to pay for its three-by-five program, while the U.N.-inspired Global Fund needs to raise several billion dollars in the years ahead.

At the Davos conference, where the fight against AIDS is being widely discussed, French President Jacques Chirac called for the creation of an “experimental” international tax that could raise as much as $10 billion each year. The levy would be imposed on international financial transactions, on fuel for air and sea transport, or by levying $1 on every airline ticket sold in the world, the report said.