People with AIDS start lining up before
dawn outside Phyu Phyu Thin's house in Yangon, waiting to see the woman they
call their sunshine.News (Updated July 8, 2007)
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Thu Jul 5, 1:38 PM ET
Gender equality and the empowerment of women are key to slowing the spread of AIDS, the United Nations agency coordinating the fight against the epidemic said Thursday in Nairobi.
"The most significant development of the AIDS epidemic is its growing feminisation," lamented UNAIDS chief Peter Piot, who was speaking at the International Women's Summit on HIV/AIDS held in Kenya.
"What entered history 25 years ago as a disease of the white gay male is now increasingly affecting women all over the world," he told some 1,500 delegates.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 percent of all adults living with the virus are female. Piot cited the example of Kenya, where the ratio reaches 67 percent.
"As an optimist, I am a firm believer that catastrophes also offer opportunities. So let's turn the paradigm upside down and make sure that the response to AIDS leverages a fatal blow to the disempowerment of women," he said.
"If it worked with gay rights, it must work with women's rights."
World Health Organisation Director General Margaret Chan said cultural obstacles to the advancement of women needed to be overcome if the virus, which affects 39.5 million people worldwide, was to be brought under control.
"We must also seize every opportunity for women to learn their infection status. Being married is not safe ... Women can turn the tide in this epidemic. Women are best placed to make existing tools work," she said.
As of June 2006, around one million Africans were receiving antiretroviral drugs which roll back the AIDS virus, a tenfold increase since December 2003.
But this was still less than a quarter of the estimated 4.6 million people in need of the drugs.
Thursday July 5, 01:46 PM
People with AIDS start lining up before
dawn outside Phyu Phyu Thin's house in Yangon, waiting to see the woman they
call their sunshine.
Some are too weak to stand, but sit or lie down outside the home of one of Myanmar's most prominent AIDS activists, in one of the countries hardest-hit by the disease.
Myanmar's health system has collapsed under decades of military rule, and Phyu Phyu Thin is one of the few people who has tried to help people living with HIV find the scant services available to them here.
For seven weeks, they waited in vain to see her after Phyu Phyu Thin was arrested in May along with more than 60 others for joining in vigils to pray for the release of Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Phyu Phyu Thin, 36, was freed late Monday, after dozens of others were released last month. About 10 are still believed to be in custody, according to Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
"We feel stronger mentally when we see Phyu Phyu Thin," said Boat Sone, the HIV-positive widow of a political prisoner who died last year of an AIDS-related illness.
"We felt really depressed when she was arrested. She is a light for us while we are living in darkness."
Phyu Phyu Thin has headed the NLD's AIDS programme since 2002, tapping into the party's youth league and recruiting students and Buddhist monks as volunteers to help about 1,000 people with HIV from around the country.
When patients come to Yangon, she helps them find places to stay and tries to match them up with the few treatment services available, mainly at clinics run by international aid agencies.
She also organises home-based care for patients who need it, and has found private donors to pay for life-prolonging drugs for about 30 people.
Although she's not a doctor herself, she talks about the people she helps as "her patients." Eleven of them were so distraught by her arrest that they held a prayer vigil last month to call for her release, only to be detained themselves for four days.
Her patients range in age from two to almost 50. They are at different stages of illness, and many live in rural areas where even basic health services are limited.
"By the time many of them come to us, they already have AIDS-related illnesses," Phyu Phyu Thin said.
Getting treatment to people in remote parts of the country is one of her most difficult challenges, a struggle shared by international agencies that are forced to work within strict limits imposed by the military government.
Emmanuel Goue, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders-Switzerland, said his group's main problem was access to their patients in southern Myanmar, where they provide 700 people with anti-retroviral drugs.
Goue said he had to ask the military for permission to travel to the region two months in advance.
"What if I have an emergency? What if my people need me now to solve some problems? Impossible!" he said.
The UN-initiated Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria withdrew from Myanmar last year due to similar complaints, although a European-led fund has formed to try to fill the gap.
The lack of treatment and prevention efforts contributes to the disease's spread in a country where the UN says some 360,000 people are infected with HIV, or about 1.3 percent of adults.
Tin Ko is one of them. He found out he had HIV only after his daughter was born with the disease.
"If we'd had a chance to prevent mother-to-child transmission, my daughter wouldn't have gotten HIV," he said. At two years old, his child is the youngest person receiving help from Phyu Phyu Thin's group.
But he's one of the lucky ones receiving anti-retroviral treatment from Myanmar's Wai Bar Gi infectious disease hospital.
"I have no fear of death, but I want to work so that others can have access to drugs," Tin Ko said.
Phyu Phyu Thin said she believed that expanding treatment programmes in Myanmar was the only way to save the country's youth.
"Treatment is needed urgently because people are dying everyday. Treatment not only can prevent death, it can also save the country's workforce of young people," she said.
Wed Jul 4, 1:31 PM ET
South Africa has seen the first-ever signs of a drop in new HIV infections, said a report released Wednesday in the country with the world's second-heaviest AIDS burden.
Preliminary reports from a 2006 ante-natal survey showed HIV prevalence among pregnant women had dropped to 29.1 percent from 30.2 percent the previous year, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told journalists in Pretoria.
"The report indicates that this decline is mainly amongst people under the age of 20 years, followed by those between 20 and 24."
The survey was carried out among pregnant women attending state clinics and hospitals, and its findings are used as an indication of the national HIV prevalence rate.
"The decline in the under 20s, from 15.9 percent in 2005 to 13.7 percent in 2006, in particular, suggests a possible reduction in new infections in the population," the minister said.
The report said HIV rates have been stable for several years, adding: "This is the first evidence of a decline in the South African epidemic".
South Africa recently launched an AIDS plan with the aim of reducing by 50 percent the rate of new infections by 2011, focusing on the youth among whom most new infections occur.
The country has the world's second heaviest caseload of HIV/AIDS, behind India, with about 5.5 million in a population of 48 million infected, as well as one of the world's highest rates of teenage pregnancy.
Fri Jul 6, 2007 8:02 AM ET
By Kamil Zaheer
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The
number of people living with HIV/AIDS in India is 2.47 million, less than half
of previous official estimates, according to new U.N.-backed government
estimates released on Friday.
India was thought to have the world's biggest HIV-positive caseload with 5.7 million infections but the new estimate puts it below South Africa and Nigeria.
The new figure was calculated with the help of the United Nations and United States Agency for International Development.
"We have about 2.47 million estimated cases which is huge in terms of numbers," Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told a news conference. "In terms of human lives affected, the number is still large, in fact very large. This is very worrying for us."
The prevalence level of the infection was now estimated to be around 0.36 percent of the more than 1.1 billion population from the earlier 0.9 percent, he said.
The minister's comments came at the launch of the country's new $2.8-billion National AIDS Control Program, which aims to expand free treatment for HIV-positive people and roll back the epidemic through more prevention campaigns.
Previously, the United Nations had arrived at the 5.7 million figure by using hundreds of surveillance centers to test the blood of pregnant women and high-risk groups such as injecting drug users and prostitutes over four months each year.
But a new population-based survey that took the blood samples of 102,000 people to test for HIV among the general public -- rather than specific groups -- indicated for the first time India's HIV caseload was highly overestimated.
The UNAIDS agency says population surveys that do not depend on someone going to a specific government clinic are "more representative" and generate "more accurate information" for rural areas and the male population.
"MORE PRECISE" ASSESSMENT
To determine the new estimate, both the population survey and surveillance data were used.
"The prevalence from the national survey has been used as almost a starting base," Peter Ghys, UNAIDS's Geneva-based Manager of Epidemic and Impact Monitoring, told Reuters.
"The expanded sources of data give us a much more precise assessment of what the status is of the epidemic," he added. "The new estimate is closer to the true prevalence."
Health experts say that in a number of countries, HIV caseloads and prevalence rates have fallen, often sharply, after they carried out population-based surveys.
In India, the fact that government surveillance centers are mainly visited by poorer people -- who are more affected by HIV -- and high risk groups led to the national estimate to be skewed upwards, they add.
Ramadoss said there was no plan to reduce funding for AIDS because of the lower estimate and added the government may actually increase funding, as 140 of India's 604 districts had a HIV prevalence of more than 1 percent.
Sujatha Rao, the head of the state-run National AIDS Control Organization, said India could not let down its guard.
"This is our last window of opportunity to reverse the epidemic and ensure it does not get into the general population because if it does, we are done for," Rao said.
Voluntary groups running anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns say the new, lower numbers should not deflect attention from the need to curb the spread of the deadly virus in a country with a crumbling government healthcare system.
Friday July 6, 7:30 PM
Vichai Chokevivat, an architect of Bangkok's controversial policy to override patents on Kaletra and two other drugs, said Abbott's $1,000 per patient, per year offer to Brazil was too high compared to generic versions costing $695 a year.
"This is the same offer they made to Thailand a few months ago on the condition that we stop the CL. That is a condition we cannot accept," he told Reuters.
The compulsory licences (CL), which Thailand announced on two HIV-AIDS drugs and a heart medicine and says are legal under world trade rules, has drawn flak from global drug makers, but applause from some health advocacy groups.
Thai price talks with the three drug makers -- Abbott, Merck & Co Inc and Europe's Sanofi-Aventis -- have produced no deals. Thailand has only imported generic versions of Merck's Efavirenz so far.
Abbott has stuck to its offer of $1,000 per patient per year for a heat-stable version of Kaletra which can survive in tropical climates like Thailand without costly cold storage.
Talks with Abbott, which has refused to register new medicines in Thailand until the compulsory licence issue is resolved, resume in two weeks, Wichai said.
"If the original price is 5 percent higher than the generic product, we will consider the original product," he said. "If it is more, we will consider the generic product."
BUDGET PRESSURE OR THEFT?
Thailand, a former AIDS hotspot, has won praise for reducing infections and expanding drug treatment to more than 100,000 of the 580,000 Thais living with the disease.
But the government says it faces budget pressures as more people need treatment through the national health scheme, which covers 80 percent of Thailand's 63 million people.
It will spend $100 million on HIV-AIDS programmes this year, but the drug industry's defenders accuse the government of stealing intellectual property and question its spending priorities.
The army-backed, post-coup government announced a 24 percent rise in annual military spending this week compared to a 4.6 percent rise for health care.
Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla said this week he was considering two more licences this year that would allow the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation (GPO), the state drug maker, to buy or produce copycat versions.
The GPO will also begin a five-month upgrade of its ageing factory in October to meet World Health Organisation (WHO) standards, an issue drug makers have highlighted in their criticism of Bangkok's drug policies.
"I think they are under a lot of pressure from critics outside, but it will be a challenge," Paul Cawthorne of Medicins Sans Frontieres said of the upgrade.
The WHO sets stringent standards for quality, safety and efficacy that are used by U.N. agencies, governments and NGOs in bulk purchasing drugs.
Last year, Thai newspapers reported the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria stopped funding an AIDS drug production project because the GPO did not meet WHO standards.