Study finds HIV/AIDS treatment goals for developing world unmet

Study finds HIV/AIDS treatment goals for developing world unmet
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: November 29, 2006


ROME: International agencies and national governments are failing to meet their goals to provide HIV/AIDS treatment to the developing world, according to a report by the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition.

"The rhetoric from public health officials is good, but the follow-through is abysmal," Gregg Gonsalves, who coordinated the report, said Tuesday. "We are woefully behind in our targets."

Earlier this year, the United Nations and the Group of 8 nations set universal access to AIDS medicines as a goal for 2010, planning to have 9.8 million people in treatment by then.

But given current trends, the world will fall five million people short of that goal, said the coalition, an international advocacy group.

The shortfall is particularly egregious when it comes to women and children, the coalition's researchers found.

Programs to use drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from mother to child at birth are reaching only 9 percent of HIV-positive women in Africa, even though the drugs are cheap and readily available, the report noted.

"Nothing has changed for women," said Anurita Bains, an assistant to Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for HIV/ AIDS in Africa, at a news conference to release the study. On children, she added: "What we find in the report is that children continue to be neglected."

Researchers looked closely at six representative nations with high rates of HIV: the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia and India. Progress in treating HIV/AIDS was disappointing in all of them.

In India only 5,595 children have been diagnosed with HIV, even though experts believe that 200,000 are infected. In Nigeria, fewer than 100,000 people were getting the anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS, though the government had planned to have more than twice as many in treatment by the middle of this year.

Chris Collins, a coalition member, said the number of people receiving drugs was "dwarfed by the number of people in need."

And Bains said the main fund that supports AIDS treatment programs in poor countries, the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, was already $1 billion short for next year.