Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Dec 26 2002 (IPS) — Even as donations from wealthy countries to a global fund to fight HIV/AIDS decline, activists are pushing for new ways to expand access to life-saving drugs in the hardest-hit parts of the world.

On Dec. 13, a new initiative called the International HIV Treatment Access Coalition (ITAC) was launched in Geneva and Dakar. ITAC aims to boost efforts to provide access to the antiretroviral drugs used to treat the disease to the growing number of infected people in low- and middle-income countries.

”There is a lot of action in different countries, by governments, donors, the private sector, NGOs and other groups,” said Stu Flavell, international coordinator of the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, a member of the new coalition.

”But we need these different players to pool their knowledge and work together. That is the only way we are going to move from treating 50 or 100 people in a village to treating hundreds of thousands across the country,” he said.

Ninety-five percent of the estimated 42 million people with HIV/AIDS live in developing countries, which accounted for over 99 percent of the 3.1 million AIDS deaths this year. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that only 300,000 HIV-positive people in these countries currently use anti-retroviral drugs – five percent of those who need them.

So far, 2.1 billion dollars have been pledged to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. About 200 million dollars has been received from the United States, an amount that critics believe is far too low. Richard Feachem, director of the fund, has called on Washington to pledge another 2.5 billion dollars on top of the 500 million it already promised.

”These drugs have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and the United States,” said International AIDS Society President Joep Lange. ”They could do the same for millions more in developing countries. If we can get cold Coca Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs.”

Celebrities like Bono of the Irish rock band U2 are also aggressively lobbying rich countries like the United States to step up their contributions to the fight against AIDS. In May, Bono visited several sub-Saharan African nations with former U.S Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in an effort to highlight the devastation the pandemic has wrought there.

In early December, Bono wrapped up a seven-city U.S. tour, in which he spoke at newspaper editorial offices, college campuses, churches and industrial plants.

”Two million Africans will die of AIDS this year because they can’t get hold of drugs that we take for granted,” Bono told parishioners at a Christian church in Kentucky. ”These drugs are so cheap to make; we just have to get them over there.”

”I’m not here as a do-gooder,” Bono added. ”This is not a cause – it’s an emergency.”

Wynonna Judd, a popular country music singer, also participated in the tour. ”We have choices; many in Africa don’t,” Judd said. ”That’s one reason I’m here. I come from a passionate family, and we want Washington to know that Kentuckians are interested in this.”

The musicians were accompanied by Agnes Nyamayarwo, a nurse and mother of eight children from Uganda who was widowed by AIDS. She later found out that she too was infected with HIV, and that she had unknowingly passed the virus on to her youngest child at birth. The child died six years later.

At a time when at least eight billion condoms are needed annually to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS in developing countries and Eastern Europe, the United States is shying away from promoting safe sex at home, says a new report from Population Action International (PAI).

PAI notes that President George W. Bush has begun appointing critics of condoms to a presidential advisory panel on AIDS. They include social conservatives like Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., founder of the Texas-based Medical Institute for Sexual Health.

Also, a fact sheet on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV has disappeared from the website of the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to lawmakers who have protested, the missing sheet was based on public health data showing that ”latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing transmission of HIV” and other sexually transmitted diseases. In its place is a notice that reads: ‘Being revised’.

The Bush administration’s hostility toward condom use worries activists in the United States and abroad. ”In 1990, the international community provided nearly 970 million condoms,” says Amy Coen, president of PAI. ”After a decade of erratic and inconsistent support, donors provided just 950 million condoms in 2000, while the U.S. contribution had dropped by roughly half.”

”This doesn’t come close to meeting the need and is morally reprehensible at a time when roughly 14,000 people become infected with HIV every day,” she added.