Dr Peter Mugyenyi helped former United States president George Bush’s widely praised US Aids fund treat millions of people and along the way his Ugandan clinic became the largest treatment centre in Africa.
At 60, he was ready to retire, but he no longer considers that an option, saying that with funding for Aids treatment threatened amid the global economic crisis, he is still needed on the continent most afflicted by the virus.
Mugyenyi, interviewed on Tuesday at an international Aids conference, said that without continued funding, Africa risks a return to the days of ”wholesale carnage,” when poor people died because they could not afford lifesaving antiretroviral drugs.
Doctors Without Borders, blaming the global economic crisis and other factors, had said at the conference that a chronic shortage of drugs to treat Aids in six African countries could cost thousands of lives. Eric Goemaere, medical coordinator in South Africa of Doctors Without Borders, added that in recent weeks some clinics have stopped accepting new patients.
Mugyenyi said officials from USAid, the main American development agency, have told his clinic to stop enrolling new patients.
USAid officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Dr Eric Goosby, newly appointed by President Barack Obama to lead US international Aids efforts, told the Associated Press the US had not told anyone to stop enrolling patients. It was not immediately possible to explain the contradiction, but Goosby’s programme is separate from USAid.
In the early 1990s, entire families and villages were being wiped out in Uganda. A triple-therapy cocktail of drugs could prolong lives, but was much too expensive for most Africans.
”Most people just threw up their hands and said it was impossible, unmanageable,” Mugyenyi said.
But India started perfecting cheap generic versions of Aids drugs, and Mugyenyi ordered a batch. They sat at Kampala’s Entebbe airport, impounded while Mugyenyi was detained, threatened with jail and called into a meeting of high-level government officials led by a Cabinet minister in the president’s office, the doctor said.
Mugyenyi said the government officials pointed to a court case in South Africa, which was being sued by 33 pharmaceutical companies and told him: ”You must be crazy. If they can put powerful South Africa in court, what chance does an individual like you stand?”
He said he told the meeting: ”Each and every one of you within this room has relatives or friends who have died [of Aids], or are in the process of dying if you do not let me have these drugs.”
The officials passed a law to allow Mugyenyi to bring in the generics, and his clinic went from treating about 500 people who had been able to afford the more expensive drugs to about 9 000, the doctor said.
When Bush decided in 2003 to help the worst-hit countries with his President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar, Mugyenyi was called in as an adviser. In Uganda, the new funding produced ”an explosion. We were treating 73 000 people at the clinic until we were able to second them to other clinics.”
Now Mugyenyi’s clinic is treating 36 500 patients with Pepfar funding, but the crisis could be on its way back, he said.
Bush’s fund is credited with saving millions of lives. Since 2003, the US has given $18,8-billion in funding.
On the campaign trail, Obama promised to expand the fund by a billion dollars a year. But the executive director of the Global Aids Alliance, Dr Paul Zeitz, said in Nairobi recently that the budget Obama’s administration submitted in May maintains funding levels at a steady $6-billion a year.
Fifteen countries with half the world’s Aids patients are helped by the US fund, 12 in Africa and Haiti, Guyana and Vietnam. It provides Aids drugs to more than two million of an estimated 3,5-million Africans receiving therapy.
Mugyenyi said he has answers for how to get lifesaving drugs to even more people despite the global economic recession.
Mugyenyi said Africans cannot afford and do not need expensive routine tests. Dropping them not only frees up money to treat others but also means people can be treated in rural villages by trained healthcare workers instead of doctors and nurses. — Sapa-AP