OLA AWONIYI, Abuja | Monday
NIGERIA will on Monday launch Africa’s first trial programme to use cheap, imported, generic Aids drugs to combat the disease sweeping the continent, officials said on Sunday.
Aiming to tackle the effects of an epidemic now affecting almost 3,5-million Nigerians, and 28,1-million Africans, the programme will start in 18 federal health centres on a limited number of patients.
It will be widened to 100 centres and 10 000 patients over coming months, officials said.
In an experiment expected to be watched closely by health officials across Africa, the trial – the idea of President Olusegun Obasanjo and Health Minister Alphonsus Nwosu – will be testing the ability of the country’s shambolic state health system’s to administer the difficult anti-retroviral drugs demanded across the continent.
Costly anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs, are widely used in the West to tackle Aids and have turned it from what was always a death sentence into, often, a chronic but not necessarily fatal disease.
However, according to some health experts, the way the ARVs have to be administered, the conditions in which they have to be kept and the degree of care and support is beyond the health systems of many African countries.
And until a court case in South Africa earlier this year, countries in Africa were banned from importing the sort of cheap generic drugs from India now to be trialled in Nigeria.
“What we are doing is a first,” admitted on Sunday an official with Nigeria’s National Action Committee on HIV/Aids.
“Other countries have tried western drugs but no-one can afford them on a big scale. What we are trying is something that will be on a big scale. It is a trial,” he said.
Attention on the experiment will be particularly intense because it comes as a special conference on HIV/Aids gets under way in nearby Burkina Faso.
Health experts, community care workers and policymakers gathered in the capital of Burkina Faso on Sunday with the goal of strengthening strategies for tackling the crisis across Africa.
The five-day conference, staged under UN auspices, was to open ceremonially late Sunday broaching the themes of efforts to overcome the Aids taboo in many countries, as well as access to cheap anti-retroviral drugs.
Deputy Health Minister Amina Ndalolo last month announced the trial programme.
‘ But on Sunday some of the drugs required for the trial had still not arrived at either of the two Lagos hospitals chosen to be among the 18 centres for the launch.
Eventually, officials recognise, the country will need to import cheap generic drugs commercially if it is to tackle the disease in a nation as large as Nigeria, with a population of 120 million, since it cannot afford free treatment for all.
Meanwhile, health workers are also concerned that more effort should be put into prevention programmes.
“Of course, everyone supports treatment programmes but it is just as important to stop more people getting it,” a health worker said on Sunday.
Since Aids was first discovered 20 years ago, 60-million people have become infected with HIV, 20-million of whom have already died. Of the 40-million people today living with Aids or HIV, 28,1-million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Meanwhile, the 12th International Conference on Aids and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Africa (CISMA) goes into a second day on Monday, with mounting demands for easier access to treatment on the continent worst-hit by the pandemic at the centre of discussions.
The five-day meeting in the Burkina Faso capital, attended by some 6 000 delegates, is on the theme of “community solutions” to a disease which has taken its main grip on the African continent. – AFP