Thousands of experts gathered in Nairobi on Sunday for a council of war on Africa’s battle against Aids, a combat characterised by a relentlessly spreading pandemic but also by some good news at last about funds and access to drugs.
Some 8 000 doctors, researchers, policymakers and grassroots campaigners were registered for the 13th International Conference on Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa (Icasa), a major forum held every two years.
The meeting was to be launched on Sunday afternoon with an update on the crisis by the specialised UN agency UNAIDS.
That will be followed over the next five days with daily plenary sessions and hundreds of side meetings, poster and oral presentations ranging from medical challenges to stigma, gender inequality, HIV prevention and traditional African medicine.
Seasoned veterans say that despite grim statistics, Africa’s struggle against Aids and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has recently taken a promising turn.
Influxes of money, notably from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and substantial cuts in the prices of antiretroviral drugs, have shifted the campaign away from safe-sex advice to the possibility of making HIV a manageable disease, as it is in the West.
”Wars need money, but that’s not the only thing,” said Lucile Astel, in charge of Aids programmes at the French Red Cross.
”The task today is now implementation. We have to build networks and have the human resources to do it.”
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids) is a disease in which the immune system is crippled by a virus transmitted through unprotected sexual intercourse, blood transfusion or shared use of intravenous drug needles.
If the virus rampages unchecked, the body loses its defences against a vast range of opportunistic diseases, ranging from cold and flu to tuberculosis and pneumonia.
A continent lacking money and medical resources to ward off the threat, and where sexual promiscuity and sexual ignorance are widespread, Africa was always a sitting duck for AIDS.
Today, around 30 million Africans — one adult in 11 ‒ have Aids or HIV, accounting for around three-quarters of the world’s total. Some 15 million Africans have already died.
In southern Africa, more than half a dozen countries have at least 20% of their adult population infected, reaching a horrifying peak in Botswana, where the prevalance nudges 40%.
Only 50 000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, at the end of last year, had access to the antiretroviral triple therapy that has made HIV a manageable condition for millions of people in the West.
The cost of these drugs has plunged, and is set to fall further thanks to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement reached in Geneva in August in which poor, vulnerable countries will be able to import cheap generic copies of patented medication under a ”compulsory licensing system.”
So the big task is to distribute them, quickly, fairly and in ways that ensure that they are not abused and resistance to the drugs develops.
Even if this ambitious campaign works Africa is left with long-term economic and social problems, inflicted by the loss of workers and the legacy of millions of AIDS orphans.
At least 10 American and five African delegates who had been sponsored by the US government decided not to attend the Nairobi meeting because of security fears, the conference’s chairman, Dundu Owili, said last Wednesday.
Washington this month extended a warning of ”high potential” for terrorist attacks targeting US citizens and interests throughout east Africa, particularly Kenya. – Sapa-AFP