”We want drugs! You talk as we die,” were some of the angry comments from Aids activists who protested on Wednesday against failure by their governments to give them anti-retroviral drugs.
Some rolled on the ground as others shouted and marched through the international conference on Aids in Africa, stopping at government, pharmaceutical and donor stands.
Donning T-shirts declaring their HIV status, the more than 100 activists of the Pan-African HIV/Aids Treatment Access Movement (Patam), demanded drugs for people living with HIV/Aids.
Patam is a pan-African coalition of activists and people living with Aids committed to mobilising governments and communities to ensure access to affordable HIV/Aids treatment.
They called on governments to implement their national HIV/Aids treatment plans in order to attain the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) goal of ensuring anti-retroviral medicine to three million people in developing countries by the end of 2005.
About six million people in developing countries have HIV infections that require anti-retroviral treatment, but less than 300 000 are being treated.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where 29-million of the 40-million people with Aids worldwide live, less than 50 000 have access to anti-retroviral therapy.
”I’m alive today because I have access to treatment. What of the thousands who have no access?” said Prudence Mabele, of the South Africa-based Treatment Action Campaign.
Mercy Otim of the Kenya Coalition for Access to Essential Medicines regretted that her country had no national anti-retroviral treatment plan, while ”250 000 Kenyans require immediate treatment or face death as a result of government neglect”.
The price of anti-retrovirals in Kenya has reduced from Ksh6 000 ($81) to Ksh3 000 ($41) per patient per month in the past year, still an exorbitant figure for a majority of the 2,4-million people living with HIV/Aids in the East African country.
A statement from Patam attributes the lack of access to life-prolonging treatment to the lack of political will.
”We are faced with enormous barriers; national governments do not prioritise HIV/Aids treatment; donor countries refuse to fulfil commitments to mobilise necessary resources, while pharmaceutical companies deny access to essential medicines and diagnostics by charging exorbitant prices,” says part of the statement.
A UNAids report indicates that in early 2000, the price of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (Haart, also referred to as triple therapy) for one patient per year cost between $10 000 and $12 000.
By the end of 2000, prices had declined to $500 to $800 per person per year for anti-retroviral treatment in developing countries.
In May this year, the least expensive brand name combination recommended by the WHO for low-income countries was about $675 per person per year, and the least expensive generic combination was just under $300 per person per year.
Rights groups maintain that prices may drop, with the high prevalence rate of HIV/Aids in developing countries.
Nevertheless, WHO’s director of HIV/Aids, Dr Paulo Teixeira, has reiterated his organisation’s commitment to access anti-retrovirals to the millions of people living with the disease in developing countries.
Early this week the WHO declared a global health emergency for failure to deliver anti-retroviral therapy for the millions of people who need it in poor countries.
”To deliver anti-retroviral treatment to the millions who need it, we must change the way we think and change the way we act,” said WHO director general Dr Lee Jong-Wook. ”Business as usual will not work. Business as usual means watching thousands of people die every day.”
The anti-retroviral crisis manifested itself again on September 23 when more than 200 Kenyans living with HIV/Aids met in a ”people’s tribunal” and passed a guilty verdict against the government and pharmaceutical companies.
They accused the government of Mwai Kibaki of indulging in ”talk shows” instead of providing life-prolonging drugs to millions of people infected by the disease.
Chanting, ”We want treatment now, we want treatment now”, they pointed fingers at pharmaceutical companies for being interested in profit-making and failing to make anti-retrovirals accessible to the poor.
The protesters met outside the venue of the ongoing Icasa conference. — Sapa-IPS