Aids conference starts
2003-08-02 19:27
Special Report
The South African government has announced a joint venture to reduce the cost of anti-retroviral drugs with a Swiss company.
Cape Town - An Aids conference starts this weekend in South Africa - where close to 1 000 people die of the disease every day - amid controversy over an eccentric diet proposed by the country's health minister.
The minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, is urging Aids sufferers to eat garlic, onions, olive oil and African potatoes to boost their immune systems, even though a recent report by the University of Stellenbosch said that most patients given an extract from the African potato (also known as the hypoxis plant) became rapidly more ill after an initial improvement.
The researchers at the university, north of Cape Town, added that raw garlic could increase internal bleeding and interfere with drugs, and that olive oil had no proven effect and that its high price might decrease poor patients' spending on other food.
Other researchers are recommending edible bugs and worms - including the stinkbug, whose odour can be washed out in hot water - as a free source of protein.
South Africa's Medicines Control Council (MCC) is meanwhile threatening to ban the anti-retroviral drug nevirapine for use in reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV, even though it is approved - and considered vital - by UN agencies, because the council considers the paperwork in a key Ugandan study to be defective.
That threat is being attacked by South Africa's long-suffering doctors as another example of the government's foot-dragging on providing life-saving drugs.
Organisers of the South African Aids Conference 2003, sponsored by South African campaigners and business leaders, but with international experts attending, say the four-day symposium opening in the east coast city of Durban on Sunday will combine science and the community "to get a broader African perspective".
"Attendants can expect to hear both sides of the story from those in the know, as well as solutions to this worrying epidemic," a statement said.
The South African lobby group Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) meanwhile said in a statement on Friday that it might take legal action over the threat by the MCC to de-register nevirapine for mother-to-child use.
The council said on Wednesday that it had given the drug's manufacturers, Boehringer-Ingelheim, 90 days to prove that nevirapine was safe and effective.
The UN World Health Organisation issued a report in July in which it continued its support for the use of nevirapine, and UNAIDS also backs it.
The TAC won a High Court order forcing the government to implement a rollout of anti-retroviral Aids drugs to pregnant mothers 16 months ago, but activists and many doctors charge that thousands of victims are dying because of government slowness in providing them.
The conference in Durban will consider a report, released by the International HIV/Aids Working Group, an organisation established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, calling for a huge increase in spending worldwide.
"Annual global spending on HIV prevention activities from all sources should increase threefold by 2005 to $5.7 billion, and to $6.6 billion by 2007," the report says.
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is envisaging providing grants of around $4.9 billion from 2002-2004, but so far has received pledges of only $2.6 billion.
US President George W Bush has proposed that Washington spend $15 billion over five years to fight Aids in Africa and the Caribbean, but that proposal is in trouble in Congress.
"Prevention scale-up must be a central priority, focusing on cost-effective, high impact interventions," the working group says, noting that globally, fewer than one in five people have access to basic HIV prevention programmes.
The report says that although Senegal, Uganda, Zambia and some other African countries have made enormous strides against the epidemic, many people at the highest risk of infection cannot obtain the support needed to change their behaviour to avoid exposure to HIV.
Of the world's 42 million people infected with HIV or full-blown Aids, 29.4 million live in sub-Saharan Africa, which had 3.5 million new infections last year, and 2.4 million Aids-related deaths. Of those, according to UNAIDS, 360 000 occurred in South Africa in 2001 - an average of 986 a day.
- AFP