NAIROBI (AFP) - Champions of traditional medicine told a major conference on AIDSin Africa that they had much to contribute to the war against the devastating epidemic.

Speakers at the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (ICASA) claimed two herbal remedies were safer and cheaper alternatives to the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat people living with HIV and AIDS.

Such people number almost 30 million in Africa, and for many of them, especially in rural areas, traditional healers are the first port of call in the case of illness.

Only about one percent of Africans who need them currently have access to antiretrovirals, and as dramatically falling prices are set to increase that proportion, there is much debate about whether the continent's healthcare infrastructure is up to the job of proper and sustained delivery of the drugs.

"We have tested, and we have seen that it works well," Erick Gbodossou, the president of the Senegal-based Prometra, an association of traditional healers, said of Metrafaids, a treatment made from five plants.

A three-year study, funded by the Ford Foundation, of the treatment was conducted using modern scientific observation methods.

According to Prometra, trials on 62 HIV-positive individuals aged 18 to 58 over the last four years showed that Metrafaids reduced the presence of the HIV virus in the body and boosted CD4 lymphocites, an important element of the immune system.

"We think that this medicine deserves to be supported, because it can help in this battle, in this reality that's going to exterminate this continent," Gbodossou said, adding that no adverse side effects had been recorded.

Without funding, "we will just keep helping people on a small scale," he added.

The beneficial effects of herbal preparations as an HIV treatment also impressed Tony Johnson, a doctor from New Zealand who has spent many years living in Kenya.

Forty-five HIV-positive people "in a very sorry state of health" living in the sprawling Nairobi slum of Kibera were treated with Taibao, a chinese infusion said to boost immunity.

"I see some potential beyond any shadow of doubt in this particular product ... in the treatment of opportunistic infections," Johnson told conference delegates.

When compared to ARV treatment, "my experience is that (herbal products in general) have been far more effective and far more rapid in their action and that they generate a far more comfortable patient," he added.

"Much more work, however, needs to be done with these products, and the tragedy of our time is that so much money is being devoted to antitretroviral treatment... without acknowledging the potential of herbal remedies.

"You must understand that the solution to HIV may lie not within a chemical laboratory but within nature," Johnson concluded.

Gitura Mwaura, the chairman of the Kenyan Coalition for Access to Essential Medicines lobby group, was also encouraged by Taibao.

"I have it on good authority from coalition doctors that the herbs are known to be doing a good job," he told AFP by telephone.

"We know traditional medicine people are helping a lot in rural villages, where there is little access to modern healthcare," he added.

"We certainly need to have mainstream doctors liaise with them," he said.

A view shared by Oscar Motsumi, a programme officer with the Botswanan health ministry who worked on a study of more than 1,200 traditional doctors in his country, where some 35.4 percent of the population carry the HIV virus.

"We need a dialogue between the two based on mutual trust... This is no longer a competition. People are dying out there," he told AFP at the conference.

In 2002, the AIDS epidemic killed some 2.4 million people in Africa, according to UN figures.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's anti-abortion policy has forced family planning clinics in poor countries to close, leaving some communities without any healthcare, according to a report issued Wednesday.

Even faith-based clinics that promote abstinence -- in line with White House policy -- have had to close, according to organizers.

Under the policy, known as the Mexico City rule by supporters and the Global Gag rule by opponents, foreign family planning agencies cannot receive U.S. funds if they provide abortion services or lobby to make or keep abortion legal in their own country.

A survey of Ethiopia, Kenya, Romania and Zambia by Population Action International and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America showed the rule had forced clinics to close and left many men and women without access to contraceptives that could prevent both unwanted pregnancies and AIDS.

"You cannot separate HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and abortion," said Hillary Fyfe, who heads the Family Life Movement of Zambia, a faith-based group working with adolescents on sex education.

While her group does not promote abortion or even condom use, it does talk about the possibility, and that was enough to lose U.S. funding, Fyfe said. Three clinics in Lusaka closed this year.

"We taught natural family planning and abstinence until marriage," Fyfe said in an interview. Now her group will be unable to holds its workshops unless they can find alternative funding, Fyfe said.

The same is happening in several countries, according to the report.

"Health services have been scaled back and closings of reproductive health clinics have left some communities with no healthcare provider," the group wrote in a statement.

HURTING AIDS EFFORTS

The policy has also hurt AIDS prevention efforts, said the group, which published the findings on the Internet at www.globalgagrule.org.

As one of his first acts in office in 2001, Bush reinstated the rule that former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had lifted. The rule was originally imposed in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan at a Mexico City conference.

Last month Bush ordered the State Department to strengthen the rule by withholding U.S. family planning help from overseas groups that promote or perform abortions with their own money.

Five family planning clinics run by nongovernmental organizations have closed in Kenya because they refused the restrictions and lost funding from the U.S. Agency for International development, the report said.

"As a result, they are prevented from participating in a large-scale integrated health care program funder by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which curtails the effectiveness and reach of the program," the report reads.

In Kenya's Mathare Valley, a family planning clinic closed, leaving 300,000 people with no healthcare services. "And there is no other family planning or reproductive health clinic nearby," the report said.

In Romania, women may be more likely to get abortions, not fewer, because the rule has meant more women cannot get any information on contraceptives that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, the report said.

"This is the real face of Bush's compassionate conservatism -- a war on the world's most vulnerable women and children, who bear the brunt of Bush's obsession with appeasing his domestic political base," Planned Parenthood's Gloria Feldt said in a statement.

But White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the policy only affected family planning clinics, not general health clinics.

"The president had just unveiled a $15 billion program to address the biggest healthcare crisis facing Africa, which is AIDS," she said in a telephone interview. "Any organization that wants to participate in delivering healthcare services relating to AIDS can do so."

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Major drug companies face increased moral, market and activist pressure as the United Nations sought cheaper HIV/AIDS drugs for millions of patients in poor countries, officials said.

Saying that the failure to provide AIDS drugs to poor people has become a global emergency, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS, the world body's lead agencies in the fight against AIDS and HIV, announced Monday a bid to provide antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to three million people in developing countries by the year 2005.

Currently, 300,000 people in those countries receive ARV medicines although nearly six million are thought to be in urgent need of the drugs because they have developed full-blown AIDS, WHO said.

But getting the drugs to those who need them will require affordable prices and UN officials appealed to the pharmaceutical industry as well as donor agencies to do more.

"Countries can't pay for these medicines without outside assistance," said Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Overall, ARV drug prices have fallen from as much as 12,000 dollars per patient per year to around 300 dollars in the past few years but the cost remains beyond the reach of the poorest, said WHO spokeswoman Christine McNab.

"We've seen the prices come down pretty significantly, but we're probably looking at needing to see them come down a little bit more, since people surviving on less than a dollar a day can't even afford to pay that much," McNab said.

To bring prices down, the global health agency will appeal to major drug makers on moral as well as commercial grounds, added WHO's Iain Simpson.

"There's going to be a huge market for antiretroviral drugs in developing countries," said Simpson.

"We can't tell the drug companies what to manufacture or at what price to sell it, but we can say that we know there is a market out there that hasn't been exploited and we're working to build it up."

Coupled with that sort of suasion will be the implied threat that if the majors, sometimes referred to collectively as "big pharma", don't cooperate, they will be superceded by manufacturers of generic drugs ranging from India's large private drug maker Cipla to smaller, government-owned enterprises in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

"There will probably be pressure on big pharma to lower their prices but the generic companies are going to play a significant role in this too," said Kevin Frost, vice president for clinical research and prevention programs at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR).

Already, generic drug makers in developing countries are making and distributing ARV treatments not protected by local patents.

The non-governmental group Doctors Without Borders, in a joint report with WHO, said Monday that Malawi and "other countries which registered generics and fostered competition between generic and originator producers had more affordable prices for ARVs."

And Brazil, using the threat that it would turn over patented drugs to local firms by invoking emergency licensing powers, has persuaded Merck and other big firms to lower their prices, Frost said.

Others might attempt to follow suit, using recent World Trade Organization agreements that allow for compulsory licensing, albeit under strict conditions, he added.

But where a large country like Brazil flexed its muscle to good effect, others' prospects remain in question.

Most developing countries "are unlikely to be lucrative markets for (drug majors) anyway," said Frost.