Aids conference opens with call for drugs for poor

Activists and top officials united in calling for cheap, life-savings drugs to be made available to combat Aids in poor countries as the world's biggest conference on the disease opened yesterday.

Peter Piot, head of the United Nations Aids agency, dismissed the argument that it is not technically feasible to bring sophisticated antiretroviral treatment to millions of people in some of the world's poorest countries.

And he said the world must never again allow the Aids crisis in Africa - where more than 30 per cent of people in some countries carry HIV - to be repeated in other continents.

"The world stood by while Aids overwhelmed sub-Saharan Africa. Never again," Piot told 15,000 people at the opening ceremony for the week-long 14th International Aids Conference.

"We cannot stand by as passive observers while other continents repeat history, and we must not fail Africa now."

UNAids warned last week the Aids epidemic was still in its infancy and could kill 70 million people over the next 20 years as it spreads deeper into Asia and Eastern Europe.

People with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, can live for many years in the West thanks to expensive antiretroviral drugs. But despite some price cuts, these drugs are available only to small numbers of people in developing countries.

"Treatment is technically feasible in every part of the world... It's not knowledge that's the barrier. It's political will," Piot said.

Outside the conference, some 500 activists took to the streets to echo Piot's call, demanding affordable life-saving drugs for two million poor people by 2004.

"During this conference, more than 50,000 people will die. We have the ability to save most of their lives, but do we have the will?" asked Michael Weinstein, head of the largest US Aids organisation, the Aids Healthcare Foundation.

A debate is raging in the Aids community over whether the stress should be on treatment or prevention, but Piot said both were needed to combat the worst epidemic the world has seen.

The gulf between the world's richest and poorest countries has never been more evident. In the West, 500,000 people were treated with drugs last year and 25,000 people died.

In Africa, which has been hardest hit by the epidemic, 30,000 are on treatment and 2.2 million died.

Fred Minandi, a 42-year-old farmer from Malawi, is one of the lucky 30,000 and living proof that providing cheap drugs to poor countries is possible, even without an infrastructure.

"There are some people who say that in Africa, people will not be able to take these drugs because they cannot tell the time," said Minandi.

"I may not have a watch but I can assure you that since I started taking my triple therapy in August last year, I haven't missed one dose."

For $10 billion a year, Aids experts are convinced they can launch a credible response to the epidemic with improved prevention against new infections and antiretroviral drugs for people already living with HIV/Aids.

But so far less than a third of the amount is available. "The response of donors to date is appalling. The $10 billion a year needed to combat Aids is equivalent to just four days global military spending or what rich countries spend on agricultural subsidies in 10 days," said Oxfam's Mogha Smith.

Piot said he had been disappointed by the lack of commitment to funding the Aids crisis at the recent G8 summit in Canada.

Morten Rostrup, president of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, said there was a simply lack of political will.

"Don't come and say we don't have resources for this. We learned from September 11 that in a few weeks it is possible to mobilise a widespread political coalition and billions of dollars to fight something that is a common threat," he said.

"This inertia is a crime against humanity, nothing else." Rostrup presented results from seven pilot projects in Africa showing that antiretroviral drug therapies could be successfully given in a low-budget setting.

His group's analysis of 743 patients showed a survival rate of 93 per cent after six months with 82 per cent of patients experiencing reductions of the virus in their blood to undetectable levels.