The United Nations and World Health Organisation (WHO) condemned Western governments on Tuesday for neglecting Africa’s Aids pandemic while lavishing money and attention on the war on terrorism.
Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, denounced as a ”grotesque obscenity” the lack of cheap anti-Aids drugs in Africa and warned that millions of orphans would be left traumatised.
”How can this be happening, in the year 2003, when we can find over $200-billion to fight a war on terrorism but we can’t find the money to prevent children from living in terror?”
He was speaking at the opening of a week-long conference in Nairobi, Kenya, which has gathered 8 000 doctors, researchers, policy-makers and activists for a ”conference of war” against the disease.
The WHO threw its weight behind Lewis by calling on rich countries to tackle Aids with the same urgency as the Iraq crisis and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak.
Timing its announcement with a UN General Assembly session on HIV/Aids, the WHO announced an ambitious plan to provide drugs to three million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, by the end of 2005: nearly four times the total of all existing projects.
”Business as usual will not work. Business as usual means watching thousands of people die every single day,” said Lee Jong-wook, director general of the WHO, which aims to use its swift response to Sars as a model for dispatching teams to dozens of countries.
Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, said the political will and money needed to dent the pandemic by 2005 was missing. The shortfall is at least $3-billion, the UN says.
Of the 42-million people in the world with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, about 30-million are in Africa. About 15-million Africans have died, a toll likely to soar as HIV infection in Southern Africa hits 40% of the population.
Despite a steep fall in the price of life-extending anti-retroviral drugs, only 50 000 people in sub-Saharan Africa apparently have access to them.
After a feeble start African governments have moved mountains in recent years but the West has remained mired in the foothills, Lewis said.
”I have to say that what’s happening to the continent makes me extremely angry … I’m enraged by the behaviour of the rich powers. This is a full-blown emergency; in every emergency there is a division of labour. Africa is struggling to hold up its end; the West is not.”
Cities and villages across the continent were being reduced to the very young and very old as the middle generation was wiped out, Lewis said.
”Something startling is happening: the increased spiral of adult deaths in so many countries means that the numbers of children orphaned each day is expanding exponentially. Africa is staggering under the load.”
The West must ensure that the WHO succeeds in treating three million people by 2005, said the UN envoy.
”Anything less is an ethical abomination.”
The Nairobi gathering is the 13th International Conference on Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa, a major forum held every two years.
Some good news was welcomed. West African states, notably Senegal, have kept infection rates low, and a number of pioneering programmes have had a dramatic impact on treatment and prevention.
But they were flickers in the general gloom. A new report from the World Bank gave a frightening forecast for Malawi: that up to half the professional workforce could die of HIV/Aids by 2005, teachers, nurses and doctors being especially badly affected.
At least 70% of Malawi’s hospital beds are occupied by Aids patients and life expectancy has plunged to just 36, according to the UN development programme.
Meanwhile in Johannesburg former South African president Nelson Mandela called on his country’s youth to lead a ”social revolution” against the disease similar to the one against apartheid.
Speaking at a youth forum attended by Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Mandela said Aids was a disaster that effectively wiped out the development gains of the past decades and sabotaged the future.
Love, support and compassion were tools in this new fight, he said.
”Once more, our people from all backgrounds, genders or age groups shall rally to a call to come together to save our nation from destruction.” — Guardian Unlimited Â