News (Updated June 29, 2008)
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Thursday, June 26, 2008
"Sometimes naivete is a good thing," says Ruby Yang about her decision in 2003 to sell her Bernal Heights home and move to Beijing to make documentaries about the AIDS epidemic in China.
The Hong Kong-born San Francisco Art Institute graduate had just finished editing "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience," Bill Moyers' highly acclaimed PBS documentary about Chinese immigration and assimilation. While working on the project with series producer Thomas Lennon, she discovered they shared a desire to address the growing rate of HIV and AIDS in China.
A partnership was formed, but the two faced significant challenges. Financing was difficult to get, and access to the rural areas in China where the infection rate was as high as 20 percent, because of botched blood donations, was harder. Even Yang's Chinese American friends balked at the audaciousness of the project.
"I'd call them and say, 'I'm going to do AIDS in China. Will you help me?' " Yang recalls during a recent interview at Video Arts in San Francisco, where she was finishing postproduction on her newest documentary. " 'No, they said. It's too sensitive.' "
But five years later, Yang, 52, and Lennon are basking in their audaciousness. Their film, "The Blood of Yingzhou District," a searing portrait of Gao Jun, an HIV-infected orphaned toddler who is shunned because relatives mistakenly fear they will contract the virus by living with him, won a 2007 Academy Award in the best documentary/short subjects category. That film, as well as the just-finished "Tongzhi in Love (A Double Life)," will be shown Saturday as part of the Frameline32 film festival.
What's more, their public service announcements about AIDS, starring international celebrities like Yao Ming and Magic Johnson, have helped change public opinion about the disease. The 30-second spots, which Lennon wrote and Yang directed, were the first major AIDS prevention ads to air on Chinese state-run television. They have been seen by more than 400 million people - in airports, subways, elevators and stores - and that's a conservative estimate, Lennon says by phone from his office in New York City.
Yang and Lennon attribute the success of their AIDS awareness ads, and their AIDS-related documentaries, to good timing. They directed their energies toward China at just the moment when the government began to acknowledge its AIDS epidemic. In 2003, Chinese authorities were forced to reach out to the international medical community to deal with an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Such contact led to a broad effort to identify and treat China's estimated 830,000 people with AIDS, as well as to launch a prevention campaign.
Suddenly, funding came through from the Starr and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, and Yang and Lennon were able to start a film production company in Beijing now called the Chang Ai ("Love and Care") Media Project and to create a series of documentaries for Chinese TV - among them a 30-minute film about an HIV-positive student who won a battle to remain in college. The film is considered one of the most candid explorations of premarital sex to be aired on Chinese TV.
As for the making of "The Blood of Yingzhou District," it "hinged on one introduction," says Lennon - a businesswoman named Zhang Ying who had organized a small charity to help the orphans of Yingzhou.
Lennon, who produced the film but did not go on location because a foreign-looking person among the crew could have caused problems, says that "China is a society where trust is growing, but it's in more limited supply than a lot of societies. So the people are very careful. The personal introduction is 80 percent of the thing."
That sense of caution and fear is captured in "Yingzhou District" and in "Tongzhi in Love (A Double Life)," a 30-minute documentary about three Beijing friends navigating the dilemmas of being gay in modern China.
Yang and her husband, Lambert Yam, a film producer who used to run the World Theater in San Francisco's Chinatown, have found Beijing hard going at times, especially the year they spent documenting the AIDS orphans in Anhui province.
"I always tell people I've spent three years in China, but it feels as if I've spent a decade," she says. "When I go there I just work, work, work. I don't take off weekends. But it has been the most satisfying experience of my life."
For their next big effort, Yang and Lennon will focus on tobacco use in China, perhaps the country's most glaring public health problem. One out of every 3 cigarettes in the world is smoked in China, and annually 800,000 Chinese die from tobacco-related illnesses.
"That scale of suffering is not normal, does not have to be," says Lennon. He and Yang have spent 18 months lining up support in the Chinese government, which Lennon says has been "very forthcoming," and trying to find philanthropic money for a series of public service announcements.
Although a tobacco-related media campaign is complicated because of the economic interests involved, Lennon says, "the timing is there." He cites Beijing's announcement last year for a smoke-free Olympics - "a signal that the issue was ripe for moving on."
"It's rare for a filmmaker to prevent loss of life," Lennon says about his commitment to AIDS prevention and other public health issues in China. "If you get that chance and don't seize it, you're a fool."
But Lennon and Yang are ready to hand off their work in China to the students and young professionals they've been training at the Chang Ai Media Project. The organization is possibly the first of its kind: a Beijing media company founded by Americans that works closely with the Chinese government and receives grants and funding from international organizations such as the U.N. Development Programme.
"We really want the local staff to take over and train more people," says Yang, who has set 2011 as the pullout date. "Already, the staff is working on its own. One young woman made a public service announcement about the earthquake in Tong-Shan. She interviewed a lot of survivors, and we're going to stream that on the Internet."
Yang says she intends to return to San Francisco, though for now China holds her focus.
"China is like an adolescent, a teenager," she says. "It's hyperactive and I like to be part of that. I want to be a teenager, too."
Seattle Times business reporter
When Bill Gates takes on the role of full-time philanthropist this summer, one of the first places he's headed is China.
That's where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will move forward on several key health programs, including HIV/AIDS prevention and a new push to curb smoking — and try to tap China's expertise to improve African agriculture.
Gates discussed the new China initiatives in an interview as the Microsoft chairman this week leaves day-to-day work at the company he co-founded 33 years ago and looks ahead to the global work of the Gates Foundation.
China might seem like an unlikely destination for Gates and the foundation, considering the wealth that China's economic boom has generated in recent years.
While the country has impoverished regions with disease epidemics, it also has expertise that could help poorer countries improve areas such as agricultural production, said Gates.
"China is kind of interesting, because ... it's a recipient [of assistance], but in a lot of ways it's a participant in the things that need to get done," Gates said. "They have capabilities that, now that they've improved their economy a lot, they can be a factor to help poorer countries."
It's also a nation of smokers. The Gates Foundation is launching a new program to help the country cut tobacco use.
China
has nearly 30 percent of the world's smokers, according to the World Health
Organization. Almost 60 percent of men in China smoke, and more than a million
people a year die from smoking-linked illnesses.
Beijing has pledged a "smoke-free Olympics," banning smoking from most indoor public spaces, workplaces and spectator areas of open-air stadiums during the summer games in August. But sharing cigarettes is entrenched in the culture.
"It will be interesting to see on tobacco how much they cooperate on that," Gates said. "The U.S. was at a much, much higher level of wealth before it did anything about tobacco, so China has a chance to act well before the equivalent time that the U.S. did."
Gates can observe the results himself. He said he plans to attend the Olympics.
The Gates Foundation is also making grants for hepatitis B vaccination in China, where the disease affects about 10 percent of the population.
And in agriculture, the foundation is developing programs to take expertise from China to Africa to help raise crop yields.
The world's two leading centers for rice research are in the Philippines and China.
The Gates Foundation is working with Asian rice researchers to focus on the needs of Africa for more varieties of rice and traits like drought resistance.
"In some cases they've just cooperated with us without us funding any activity," Gates said. "In some cases, we fund them to pay particular attention to the problems in the case of that crop out of Africa."
To begin tackling the HIV/AIDS problem in China, the Gates Foundation opened an office in Beijing last year and hired Ray Yip, a former China director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, to head the program. It has committed an initial $50 million for the effort.
China's government is wary of foreign nonprofit organizations working on sensitive issues. Many nongovernmental organizations are mistrusted, and the country's top AIDS activists are routinely put under house arrest.
Gates said the foundation worked closely with the China's Health Ministry on its programs.
"On some, like the AIDS thing, they were very welcoming, and it's good collaboration," he said. "It will vary by topic how much you get government cooperation on those things."
Peter Piot, executive director of the UNAIDS, a joint United Nations program, said the Gates Foundation is making the right choice to intervene early.
"One of the lessons of the AIDS epidemic has been anything can happen," he said. "With the incredible transformation of China as a country, as a society — changes in sexual behavior, rampant prostitution in many places. ... We have epidemics in men who have sex with men in about every Chinese city we've looked at."
In Africa, many of the countries where the epidemic is worse by proportion are small nations. Botswana, with one of the highest HIV rates in the world, has a population of only 1.6 million people. That's not the case in China.
"Just imagine if we waited until 1 percent of China is infected with HIV," Gates said. "That's 1 percent of 1.3 billion people — that's 13 million."
"I think it's money well spent," he said. "It's very well targeted to where the epidemic is today."
Seattle Times reporter Sandi Doughton contributed to this report.
Mon Jun 23, 11:38 AM ET
Former
South African president Nelson Mandela arrived in Britain Monday ahead of a
90th birthday concert in his honour in London's Hyde Park.
The three-hour gig on Friday, headlined by veteran rockers Queen alongside the likes of Razorlight and Simple Minds, will also support Mandela's 46664 campaign against HIV/AIDS.
The campaign, named after Mandela's prison number during his 27-year incarceration, aims to raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which is rife in sub-Saharan Africa.
South Africa is one of the countries worst hit by HIV, with 5.41 million people living with the illness. Mandela himself lost a son to AIDS in January 2005.
Royalty, former US president Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, US actors Robert De Niro, Will Smith and Forest Whitaker, US television host Oprah Winfrey and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton are to attend events spread over three days leading up to the concert, organisers said.
The benefit event also marks the 20th anniversary of the Free Mandela concert at London's Wembley Stadium in June 1988, which reached a worldwide television audience of 600 million.
At the time, Mandela, who was born on July 18, 1918, was about to turn 70 and had been in prison for 25 years. He was freed in 1990 and went on to become South Africa's first post-Apartheid president.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who retired from frontline politics nine years ago, is expected to take to the stage on Friday.
Precisely 46,664 tickets went on sale at 65 pounds (82 euros, 127dollars) each.
Previous 46664 concerts have been held in Cape Town; George, South Africa; Madrid; and Norway.
NEW DELHI - Hundreds of gay activists prepared to march in three Indian cities Sunday in the largest display of gay pride in the deeply conservative country where homosexuality is illegal, organizers said.
Gay rights supporters planned to take to the streets of Calcutta, Bangalore and New Delhi with rainbow flags and banners calling for an end to discrimination and pushing for acceptance in a society where intolerance is widespread.
"We are saying for the first time we feel safe enough and strong enough to come out to the streets and say we have our rights and we demand them," said Lesley Esteves, 32, a gay rights activist who helped organize the New Delhi parade.
While small groups have marched in the eastern city of Calcutta in recent years, Sunday's events are the first gay pride parades in Bangalore and New Delhi.
The marches come just days before the Delhi High Court is expected to hear arguments about overturning a law against homosexual sex that dates to the British colonial era. The law, which forbids acts "against the order of nature," carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison.
The law is rarely enforced, but activists say it sanctions discrimination.
"Discrimination is widespread because there is no protection or law or societal understanding," said Esteves. "There's discrimination in the workplace, there's discrimination in the family _ it's on every level."
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, a senior leader of India's main Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, called homosexuality "unnatural" and said he opposed the gay activists' march.
"I don't think it will be accepted in our country. Most of the people are traditional people, religious people and it will not be accepted in Indian culture," Naqvi said.
Naqvi said BJP supporters would not protest the march because "we are not going to give importance to such behavior."
Still, there are signs that homosexuality is becoming more accepted in India, at least in big cities. In New Delhi, gay and lesbian groups hold biweekly movie screenings and parties, and organizers say attendance is rising. Newspaper editorials have called for revisions to the law, and prominent writers and activists have signed petitions expressing their support.
Activists say marginalizing gay people is also a serious health concern because it drives them underground and makes them more likely to engage in unsafe sex.
More than 5 percent of gay men are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, compared to 0.36 percent of the general population, according to statistics compiled by the Ministry of Health. An estimated 2.5 million people in India are infected with HIV.
Thursday June 26, 8:37 am ET
By Jim Abrams, Associated Press Writer
The agreement sets the stage for the Senate to vote in the near future on the five-year bill that would more than triple the size of the $15 billion global AIDS bill that Congress, at the urging of President Bush, passed in 2003. The current act expires at the end of September.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said they had an "agreement in principle" with several Republican senators, led by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who had voiced opposition to aspects of the bill.
With that agreement, Reid said, "we should be able to do this quickly and easily and it should be done before President Bush goes to the G-8 Summit next week. That would send an important message to the world that our country's commitment to fight HIV/AIDS has not wavered."
Reid said his preference was to pass the bill this week, but others involved in the negotiations said it was more likely the Senate would take it up after returning from the July 4 recess.
Coburn, a medical doctor who has treated AIDS patients, held up the bill over his demands that a fixed percentage of funding go to treatment programs. The 2003 bill stipulated that 55 percent of funds go to treatment, but that figure was taken out of the bill that overwhelmingly passed the House last April.
Writers of the new bill argued that caregivers on the ground would be better able to determine how to allocate money on prevention and treatment programs, but Coburn said there was a danger of money being diverted into unrelated development and poverty programs.
Under the tentative agreement, "more than half" of bilateral AIDS funding would be spent on treatment.
"I'm encouraged the Bush administration and congressional leaders decided to restore much of this key provision that has been so integral to PEPFAR's success," Coburn said, referring to the acronym for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
The tentative deal also requires that drugs procured by PEPFAR be approved by the Food and Drug Administration or a stringent regulator authority and prevents funding for more wealthy countries such as Russia and China.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del., who negotiated the deal with ranking Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana and the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Michael Enzi of Wyoming, welcomed the deal, saying HIV/AIDS alone claimed 2 million lives last year and "it is our moral obligation to lead the effort to fight these diseases."
David Bryden, spokesman for the Global AIDS Alliance, said they were carefully reviewing the compromise but were concerned that amounts set aside for treatment could limit funding for other programs such as those helping children orphaned by AIDS. "We will be forced to oppose this bill if it compromises the effectiveness of the AIDS program," he said.
The current PEPFAR act, operating mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, has been one of the major successes of the Bush administration's foreign policy, supporting anti-retroviral treatment for about 1.5 million. It is on target to prevent 7 million new infections and provide care for 10 million, including orphans and vulnerable children.
The new and expanded bill has been promoted by the White House, which actively engaged in the negotiations, and supported by presumed presidential nominees Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John McCain, R-Ariz.
Negotiators cautioned that several conservative Republicans still have issues with the bill, including the $50 billion price tag.
But they said it was important to achieve progress before the July 7-9 G-8 summit in Japan, when Bush will be urging other industrialized nations to contribute more to the global effort to combat AIDS.
Thu Jun 26, 8:04 AM ET
Africa's
AIDS epidemic is so severe that it should be classed as a disaster
comparable to floods or famine, the Red Cross said Thursday.
In its annual "World Disasters Report", the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said that there was "no doubt" that HIV/AIDS matches the UN definition of a disaster.
About two thirds of the world's HIV-positive cases are in sub-Saharan Africa. At least one person in 10 is living with HIV in nations such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zambia, the report said.
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs classes a disaster as a "serious disruption of the functioning of a society, causing widespread human, material or environmental losses which exceed the ability of a society to cope using only its own resources".
The Red Cross said such a crisis now exists in Africa.
The consequences of the epidemic are felt by all of society and not just those who are sick, due to the economic strain and social tensions.
"Reflecting on the lives of most people living in sub-Saharan Africa raises more alarm than hope," the IFRC said.
"The virus is directly responsible for restraining and reducing human and resource capacities across societies because HIV infections and AIDS deaths are common among workers of all qualifications and expertise, and in all industries.
"Coupled with the high costs of caring for people living with HIV, those capacity constraints lead to withered health and education systems, declining food security, skilled labour shortages and an increasingly ramshackled infrastructure," the report warned.
Lindsay Knight, who edited the report said: "The HIV and AIDS epidemic is a disaster whose scale and extent could have been prevented. Ignorance, stigma, political inaction, indifference and denial all contributed to millions of deaths."
Mobility and migration are adding further difficulties in the management of the disaster.
"The HIV epidemic can spell disaster for both sending and receiving communities, as well as communities along transit routes," said the report.
For instance, in countries with relatively low HIV prevalence, such as the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan, a larger proportion of returning migrants had the disease compared to the general populations.
About 35 percent of all documented HIV cases in the Philippines were among returning workers who have worked overseas, while in 2006, they made up 42 percent of new HIV cases, the report noted.
The World Health Organisation said this month that the number of people in developing countries receiving antiretroviral drugs to combat HIV had risen sevenfold in the past three years to nearly three million by 2007.
But a WHO co-authored report found that much more needed to be done: despite the increase, an estimated 6.7 million people in need of anti-retrovirals were still unable to access medicines, out of a total of 9.7 million.
The report, produced in conjunction with UNAIDS and UNICEF, said that the rise was due to the increased availability of drugs, in part due to price cuts, but also to delivery systems better adapted to specific country needs.
But there was also increased demand for the treatment, as the number of people tested and diagnosed with HIV climbed, the WHO noted.
Earlier this year, a joint UN study found that more than two million children worldwide were living with the HIV virus in 2007, most of whom were infected before they were born.
Thu Jun 26, 8:58 PM
NEW
YORK (AFP) - The city of New York on Thursday launched an HIV-screening
campaign that aims to test every adult in the Bronx, the city's borough most
affected by AIDS, the health department said.
Forty locations in the region north of Manhattan, including hospitals, clinics, health centers and places of worship, are offering systematic HIV testing to all patients or visitors -- the largest HIV testing initiative in the city's history.
The objective is to test everyone in the Bronx ages 18 to 64 within the next three years. About 250,000 people, or three of 10 Bronx adult residents, have never been tested, the city estimates.
"We'd like to saturate the Bronx with testing," said Monica Sweeney, assistant commissioner for HIV prevention and control.
"Knowing your status is one of the best things you can do to stop the spread of HIV."
Friday is National HIV Testing Day in the United States.
Several community groups are partnering with the city to conduct the tests, mostly administered orally, which yield results in 10 to 20 minutes.
In 2006, 3,745 New Yorkers were newly listed as HIV-positive -- one quarter of them from the Bronx.
Manhattan, the city's most affluent borough, has more HIV-positive residents but fewer AIDS deaths than the Bronx, where a quarter of those infected only learn of their status once they have full-blown AIDS.
In a study released last week, New York's health department revealed that only 60 percent of New Yorkers who have had sex with more than one partner use condoms.
Thu Jun 26, 2008 12:05 AM BST
By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - HIV/AIDS infection rates are growing among intravenous drug users, prostitutes and gay men around the globe but they are often viewed as outcasts and refused treatment, according to a report issued on Thursday.
The report, from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, also called on governments and humanitarian agencies to pay more attention to AIDS in their response to natural disasters and armed conflicts.
"HIV is a long-term and complex disaster on many levels ... For marginalized groups across the world -- injecting drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men -- rates are on the increase," said the Geneva-based humanitarian agency.
Those groups, living on the fringes of society in many countries and especially in the developing world, "often face stigma, criminalization and little, if any, access to prevention and treatment services," it added.
The 248-page study, an annual World Disasters Report, gave no new figures for AIDS sufferers but cited United Nations statistics that 2.1 million died from the disease last year.
The Federation said the HIV virus was at the root of a rolling social crisis across southern Africa.
Its officials told a news conference the recent violence in Zimbabwe -- where until recently the battle against AIDS had benefited from a widespread treatment network -- could disrupt medical care and make that situation worse.
"We must not let what we have achieved be put into reverse," Federation specialist Mukesh Kapila said. The body's deputy secretary general Ibrahim Osman said it would help the Zimbabwe Red Cross double the HIV sufferers it supports to 260,000.
The Federation said it centered its 2008 World Disasters Report on the immune-destroying disease rather than floods or earthquakes because for many communities the epidemic "is undoubtedly a disaster."
"Government services are overwhelmed by the need for support and treatment, stigma still prevents access for many, even where services exist, and communities are devastated by its effects," it said.
There were 405 natural disasters worldwide last year, compared to 423 in 2006, the Federation said. Those killed just under 17,000 people, the lowest annual figure for a decade, but the numbers affected rose by 40 percent to 201 million.
(Editing by Charles Dick)
Most transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS in these countries is heterosexual, and the researchers said it is mainly among married couples or people who live together.
"To reduce HIV transmission, couples need to know their joint (HIV status) and have access to information which enables them to reduce the risk of infection both within and outside the union," Dr. Kristin Dunkle of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet.
"This is especially important for women, who might not have the cultural freedom to negotiate condom use and sexual activity within a union," they added.
Using a mathematical model based on existing data from voluntary HIV counseling and testing in urban Zambia and Rwanda, Dunkle and colleagues showed that 55 to 93 percent of new HIV infections among heterosexuals occur within couples who are married or living together.
When they figured in the higher rates of condom use among heterosexual partners not living together, the estimate of new infections among married couples and those living together rose to 60 to 94 percent.
Next, they figured out how this transmission rate might change if the couples got HIV counseling, using the results from a program in Zambia that reduced transmission among couples living together from 20 percent to 7 percent.
If applied more broadly, they believe a similar program could cut transmission rates by 36 to 60 percent.
The researchers said most HIV prevention efforts in Africa are focused on abstinence and nonmarital sex, but their findings suggest investing in programs that focus on couples who are married or living together might have a significant impact.
Sixty-eight percent of all people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, where 76 percent of all AIDS-related deaths occurred in 2007. AIDS infects 33 million people globally and has killed 25 million since the epidemic began in the 1980s.
(Editing by Maggie Fox and Eric Walsh)