Salon.com > Sarah Boseley

“People shouldn’t die because they have sex”

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:28:00 +0000

Europe, led by the U.K., Wednesday night signaled a major split with the United States over curbing the AIDS pandemic in a statement that tacitly urged African governments not to heed the abstinence-focused agenda of the Bush administration.

The statement, released for World AIDS Day Thursday, emphasizes the fundamental importance of condoms, sex education and access to reproductive health services. "We are profoundly concerned about the resurgence of partial or incomplete messages on HIV prevention which are not grounded in evidence and have limited effectiveness," it says.

While the United States is not named, there is widespread anxiety over the effect of its pro-abstinence agenda in countries such as Uganda, where statements by Janet Museveni, the president's wife, and alleged problems with supply have led to a serious shortage of condoms.

40 million and climbing

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:40:00 +0000

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is continuing its deadly spread across the globe, infecting 5 million more people last year and bringing the total living with the virus to over 40 million, the United Nations said Monday.

The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in its latest update on the figures, tried to lighten the gloom by pointing to Kenya, Zimbabwe and some Caribbean countries, where there is some limited evidence that infection rates may be dropping slightly. But in the worst-hit regions, notably sub-Saharan Africa, the trend is steadily upward, and in India there are suggestions that the scale of infection could be worse than the official figures imply.

Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said it was encouraging that prevention efforts had led to gains in some countries. "But the reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it."

At a press conference in New Delhi, India, he said Asia, which contains half of humanity, was particularly at risk. China and Burma, which he said had the worst epidemics in Asia, have been slow to acknowledge the scale of the problem. "In the world's most populous nation, China, the overwhelming majority of the population does not know how the virus is transmitted."

Brazil won’t be bullied

Wed, 04 May 2005 15:36:00 +0000

Brazil Tuesday became the first country to take a public stand against the Bush administration's massive AIDS program, which is seen by many as seeking increasingly to press its anti-abortion, pro-abstinence sexual agenda on poorer countries.

Campaigners applauded Brazil's rejection of $40 million for its AIDS programs because it refuses to agree to a declaration condemning prostitution. The government and many AIDS organizations believe such a declaration would be a serious barrier to helping sex workers protect themselves and their clients from infection.

The demand from the U.S. administration, heavily influenced by the religious right, follows what is known as the "global gag" -- a ban on U.S. government funds to any foreign-based organization that has links to abortion. This has resulted in the removal of millions of dollars of funding from family-planning clinics worldwide.

Tuesday Pedro Chequer, the director of Brazil's HIV/AIDS program, said the government had managed to resist U.S. pressure during negotiations on the AIDS funding to focus on promoting abstinence and fidelity rather than condoms -- another ideological battle being waged by the religious right. But the U.S. negotiators insisted that the clause on prostitution had to stay.

Undermining success

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:30:00 +0000

Uganda, considered a beacon in Africa for its AIDS-beating policies, is adopting sexual-abstinence-only programs financed by the United States that could undo all its successes, a report released Wednesday says. Human Rights Watch warns that the new policies, which promote abstinence until marriage rather than condom use, leave not only young unmarried people but also women married to unfaithful men without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from infection.

Research within Uganda by Human Rights Watch has found that information on condoms, safer sex and the risks of HIV in marriage has been removed from primary schools, while some materials used in secondary schools falsely suggest that condoms have microscopic holes that allow the virus through. The AIDS awareness programs in schools are funded by the United States and overseen by an American technical advisor at the Ministry of Education.

"These abstinence-only programs leave Uganda's children at risk of HIV," said Jonathan Cohen, one of the report's authors. "Abstinence messages should complement other HIV-prevention strategies, not undermine them."

The “worst catastrophe ever”

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:42:00 +0000

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is the worst catastrophe in history and is blighting childhood across the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said Thursday. Advances in children's survival, health and education are being reversed by a "triple whammy" of AIDS, conflict and poverty, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. The disease is driving the destruction of basic services for 1 billion children and violating their right to grow and develop, said Carol Bellamy, the organization's executive director. "We believe AIDS is the worst catastrophe ever to hit the world," she told the Guardian. "It is just ripping up systems, be it health or education. Our children's childhood is being robbed from them."

But the agency and Bellamy have been strongly criticized by the editor of one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet. In an editorial published Friday, Richard Horton said UNICEF's "preoccupation" with children's rights meant that the fundamental right to survival was, "shamefully," not at the core of its work. "In sum, for almost a decade, child survival has failed to get the attention it deserves," he writes.

An “endangered species”

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:03:00 +0000

The AIDS pandemic rampaging around the globe will not be stopped without radical social change to improve the lot of women and girls, who now look likely to die in greater numbers than men, United Nations agencies said Tuesday. Infections among women are soaring, from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia to Russia. What began as a series of epidemics among men -- in some regions gay and bisexual men, in others men who frequented sex workers or male drug users -- has spread to their female partners, who are biologically more easily infected.

In many countries, women's subordinate status, and their lack of education and economic power, have made it impossible for them to negotiate sex with men or to ask for the use of condoms. Tuesday the UN agency set up to combat the pandemic, UNAIDS, called for all that to change in the interests of checking the spread of a disease that killed 3.1 million adults and children last year.

"We will not be able to stop this epidemic unless we put women at the heart of the response to AIDS," said UNAIDS' executive director, Peter Piot.

The Iraqi body count

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:39:00 +0000

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians -- half of them women and children -- have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll by Iraqi and U.S. public health experts.

The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly chosen neighborhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

Thursday night the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publication on its Web site after rapid, but extensive peer review and editing because, said Lancet editor Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq." But the findings raised important questions also for the governments of the United Sates and Britain, which, said Horton in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians."

UK rejects US policy on AIDS

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 14:04:00 +0000

The UK yesterday signalled a major rift with the United States over its Aids policies, publicly rejecting the Bush doctrine that sexual abstinence is the best way to stop the spread of the pandemic.

The international development minister, Gareth Thomas, also made it clear the UK did not support the US over its reluctance to endorse the use of cheaper, generic drugs to fight the disease.

Arriving at the International Aids conference yesterday, where America has been relentlessly attacked by campaigners and criticised by UN agencies, Mr Thomas said that the UK was neither prepared to fall in with conservative American thinking nor sit on the sidelines.

His intervention came ahead of the launch by the prime minister next Tuesday of the government's own #1.5bn Aids plan. "We work with the Americans in a whole variety of ways, but we have a difference of view on abstinence-only campaigns," said Mr Thomas.

The Bush administration pledged $15bn (#8bn) to Aids over five years, but the vast bulk will go to programmes that stress abstinence. The ABC policy for Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms "where appropriate" sits relatively comfortably with the religious right in the US and the faith groups working in the developing world who tend to be the Americans' chosen partners.

U.S. defends abstinence policy

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:20:00 +0000

The man charged with implementing George Bush's $15bn (#8bn) emergency plan to fight Aids yesterday embarked on a spirited defence of American policy, calling for his opponents to sink their differences with the US in the interests of global action against the disease.

Randall Tobias, speaking to the International Aids conference in Bangkok, supported policies that have been heavily criticised such as sexual abstinence as the best way to avoid HIV/Aids. He also backed the US's determination to spend its money on its own bilateral priorities in selected countries. He suggested that the sometimes aggressive opposition to the US way of doing things was counter-productive.

"Let me say this as directly as I can: HIV/Aids is the real enemy," he said. "The denial, stigma and complacency that fuel HIV/Aids these too are the real enemies. It is morally imperative that we direct our energies at these enemies, not at one another.

"We may not agree on every tactic employed by every donor and we may have passionate opinions about how things can be done better, but we must work with each other to find the best solutions, while knowing that every person in this fight simply wants to save lives. That is a noble calling and should be appreciated and respected."

France accuses U.S. of AIDS blackmail

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 12:45:00 +0000

America was yesterday accused by France of blackmailing developing countries into giving up their right to produce cheap drugs for AIDS victims.

In a move that may strain tense relations between the two countries, the French president, Jacques Chirac, said there existed a real problem of favourable trade deals being dangled before poor nations in return for those countries halting production of life-saving generic drugs.

These cheap drugs compete with identical but more expensive patented varieties made by the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

"Making certain countries drop these measures in the framework of bilateral trade negotiations would be tantamount to blackmail, since what is the point of starting treatment without any guarantee of having quality and affordable drugs in the long term?" Mr Chirac wrote in a statement that was read to the International AIDS conference in Bangkok yesterday.

Although the president did not name the Bush administration in his attack, French officials later explicitly named the U.S. as being at the heart of the problem.

AIDS treatment falls short

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:08:00 +0000

The global response to HIV/Aids is falling far short of what is needed to turn around the pandemic, with only a tiny minority of those affected receiving treatment and prevention programmes patchy, UNAids warned yesterday.

Two reports from UNAids at the Bangkok International Aids conference revealed that Aids prevention programmes had yet to have a significant impact on the spread of the virus.

Only 7% of those with HIV who need drugs to stay alive over the next two years are getting them, and a mere 8% of babies whose mothers are HIV-positive are being protected by one pill given to the woman while in labour and another to the child after it is born.

Although the numbers on treatment have gone up by more than half, to an estimated 440,000, and the number of pregnant women being tested for HIV has doubled to 5.5 million, with 71,000 receiving drugs to avoid passing the virus to their baby, the gains are small in proportion to the scale of the need, says UNAids.

Only 3.6% of injecting drug users in 2003 had access to help to avoid HIV infection or to treatment. Even condom provision is too low 12bn are needed each year for protection from the virus, but of the 6.9bn used last year, only 2.7bn were used for disease prevention. The one real gain was in Aids education, available now to about half of all secondary schoolchildren worldwide and two-thirds in Africa.

Anger after U.S. blocks AIDS scientists

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 13:59:00 +0000

The US government came under scathing attack from senior members of the medical establishment yesterday for blocking scientists from attending the International AIDS conference which opened in Bangkok.

The biennial conference, with 17,000 delegates, is more political rally than scientific meeting and bears huge significance for those involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

The US government has sent only a fraction of its usual contingent of scientists, pleading cost 50 instead of the 236 who attended the last event in Barcelona in 2002.

The Department of Health and Human Services, headed by the health secretary, Tommy Thompson, was yesterday accused of actively preventing certain US scientists and doctors who had a contribution to make from travelling to Bangkok.

Many suspect that behind the action lies a rift between the US and AIDS activists who oppose America's approach to the global pandemic.

Joep Lange, president of the Sweden-based International AIDS Society, which organises the conference, said it had been forced to retract papers that had been accepted for conference sessions after the US scientist authors had been refused permission to come. Many meetings, some to train developing world researchers, have had to be cancelled.