Up to 10,000 to receive AIDS drugs

Up to 10,000 people living with HIV/AIDS will soon receive anti-AIDS drugs in a government programme to accelerate access to treatment, the Zambian minister of health told PlusNews on Monday. "With an HIV prevalence [rate] of 20 percent, we felt it was morally incorrect to just let people die, even though we will continue with our prevention, care and support campaigns," Dr Brian Chituwo said. The project will establish nine treatment centres in the provinces, with a team consisting of a physician, faith healer, counsellor and social worker in each centre. "The training of health workers will begin next week, and it will be holistic - the whole team will be exposed to the pharmacology of antiretrovirals, so that they are all aware of the complications that may arise," Chituwo said. The entry point will be through the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT). HIV-positive mothers and fathers, and their babies will be the first to receive treatment. Monitoring the therapy would still be difficult, as there were only two centres for CD4 and viral load testing in the country, Chituwo said. Existing guidelines for managing patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART) use viral load and CD4 count testing to measure the impact of ART on the patient's health. "We expect more laboratories to scale up their facilities, once the programme is expanded," he added. The initial funding for the project has been budgeted for and approved by parliament. A portion of the money awarded to the country by the Global Fund, as well as a US $2 million World Bank loan "will help sustain" it. Chituwo called for more cooperation and funding from private companies. "If everyone comes on board, hopefully we will soon have more than 10,000 people on treatment." "10,000 is still a drop in the ocean when we look at the number of people who need treatment," Winston Zulu, coordinator of the AIDS NGO Kara Trust, told PlusNews. He said: "The situation now is that there is basically no access to treatment in the public sector. There has been too much talk and very little being done. You read the papers and things are going nicely and smoothly, but when you go into the hospitals or speak to people living with AIDS, things are different." Zulu will this week be attending an all-Africa meeting of civil society groups and NGOs working in the area of HIV/AIDS care and treatment, to highlight the lack of adequate treatment in Zambia. The meeting, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, will set the foundation for a pan-African activist movement to fight for access to HIV/AIDS treatment. "The idea is to create an African voice so that if something is not moving in Zambia, activists in other countries will do something," he said.