Aids forum calls for cheap drugs

The developed world has been criticised for failing to provide enough funds to fight the Aids epidemic, at the opening of a major conference on the virus.

The developed world has been criticised for failing to provide enough funds to fight the Aids epidemic, at the opening of a major conference on the virus. As 5,000 scientists and doctors met in Paris for the biggest Aids convention this year, fresh demands were made for universal access to cheap drug treatments. Opening the conference, former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso rounded on the US for basing its Aids prevention programmes on sexual abstinence rather than condom use. He urged the global community to learn from Brazil’s example of setting up education campaigns, expanding basic health care and providing anti-retroviral drugs to all infected people. “Science and clinical advances are diminished if their benefits do not reach the people suffering from the effects of HIV” Prof Michel D Kazatchkine, conference chair Brazil has cut the death rate from Aids by 50% and hospitalisations by 75%, he told the conference. “The Brazilian experience confirms that ambiguous and inconsistent messages like those (which) advocate abstinence and fidelity as solutions run the risk of generating a misleading sense of security,” he said. Activist Marie-Jos Mbuzenakamwe told the conference that 90,000 people in Burundi needed anti-retroviral drugs – and only 1,000 were getting them. Research unveiledShe said the global fund to fight Aids, TB and malaria was almost bankrupt and criticised the industrialised Group of Eight (G8) countries for making speeches about the problem but failing to act on it. The conference has opened in France because it was exactly 20 years ago that French researchers published evidence that HIV causes Aids. Nelson Mandela will speak at the conference A rival American team claimed to have got there first and disputes between the two were bitter and personal. But the feud at least seems to be over. Twenty years on, the leaders of the French and American teams, Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, will share the conference platform over the next few days as they cast their expert eyes over recent research. Despite 20 years of research, there is still no effective vaccine against Aids. But with the modern science of genomics allowing researchers unprecedented insights into the workings of cells and viruses, a raft of potential new approaches to vaccination will be unveiled here. (Source: BBC, 13 July 2003, By Richard Black)