The United States, under pressure from its giant pharmaceutical companies, is trying to undermine the use in poor countries of cheap, copycat Aids drugs, made by “pirate”, generic companies but validated by the World Health Organisation (WHO), campaigners claim. US drug companies want the money promised for President George W Bush’s Aids plan to be spent on their products.
No image available
/ 25 February 2004
Grace Matnanga is a happy woman. She is about as poor as you can be, earning the equivalent of R75 a month selling shoes from a tiny market stall. In the past year something fundamental has changed. One doctor’s act of kindness has led
to a lifeline for the HIV-positive in stricken Malawi.
No image available
/ 1 December 2003
Esther is one of the least fortunate children on earth, but one of the luckiest of those, although she can’t know it. At first glance she looks to be two or three years old, but her eyes are too large, her head is too big. She is five years old, and although she has not been tested, the clinical officer has no doubt she has Aids.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=24270">NGOs challenge govt on rape drugs</a>
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=24253&t=1">China crisis</a>
No image available
/ 28 November 2003
More than 11-million children in sub-Saharan Africa have now lost one or both parents to Aids, and the fast-rising death toll suggests that within seven years the number will have climbed to 20-million, says Unicef, the United Nations children’s organisation.
The Bush administration’s ban on funds to family planning clinics that offer abortion counselling is adversely affecting the supply of condoms to countries hit by HIV/Aids, it was claimed recently. The policy was introduced by Ronald Reagan, thrown out by Bill Clinton and reinstated on George W Bush’s second day in office.
No image available
/ 1 September 2003
An eleventh-hour deal to provide cut-price drugs for the world’s poorest people was being finalised in Geneva last week in an effort to save next month’s trade summit in Cancun, Mexico, from collapse.
Some of the -billion announced by President George Bush to save the lives of people with Aids in poor countries could be spent on cheap copycat generic medicines that the giant US-based drug companies brand as ”pirates”, his advisers revealed yesterday.
World Bank projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars and aimed at cutting malnutrition among children in developing countries have completely failed to make a difference, according to a report published last week.
Scientists in the field of human fertility are coming under pressure to rein in maverick researchers whose experiments push ethical boundaries and caused public revulsion this week.
The United Kingdom will advise all new mothers to breastfeed their babies exclusively for six months before introducing solid foods.