AIDS groups lobby health summit

As a week-long meeting of health ministers organised by the African Union (AU) got underway in Johannesburg on Monday, AIDS activists expressed concern that commitments on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, reached at several meetings last year, were missing from the agenda.

Conference delegates are spending this week considering a draft health strategy for the next eight years, to produce a roadmap for strengthening Africa's weak health systems and helping the continent achieve health-related United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

But according to a coalition of 53 AIDS organisations and civil society groups, the draft plan fails to include a number of targets relating to the goal of universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention and care agreed to by African governments at an AU summit on AIDS, TB and malaria in Abuja, Nigeria, in May 2006.

"We believe it would be a waste of energy to start with new commitments when, in Abuja last year, they all acceded to a document that was well thought out and detailed," Olayide Akanni of Journalists Against AIDS, a Nigerian organisation that is part of the coalition, told journalists on Tuesday. "The health strategy we have before us now contains no timelines, there's no monitoring and evaluation plan, there's nothing to hold them to it."

A petition listing the coalition's concerns called for the Abuja document to be used to guide the discussions in Johannesburg, and demanded that African governments "translate their commitments to action". Akanni said little progress towards the Abuja targets, which include 80 percent coverage of antiretroviral treatment (ART) by 2010, had so far been made. Most countries on the continent currently have less than 30 percent ART coverage.

The petition also pointed to the failure of all but two African governments to reach a 15 percent target for national health spending, agreed to in 2001.

Among other items the coalition would like this week's meeting to address are regional plans for tackling gender-based violence; scaling up HIV prevention services; strengthening the regulations that control medicines to make them safer and more affordable; and the health implications of Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis.

Referring to the conference's theme of strengthening health systems, the petition argued that "rapid scale-up of AIDS services need not compromise health systems, and AIDS can be the engine of strengthening primary medical care in Africa".

While civil society groups had been closely consulted in Abuja, Regis Mtutu of the South African Treatment Action Campaign, an AIDS activist group, described this week's meeting as "taking place in a vacuum."
 
"We're not anti-government, but we have a right to engage them. We just want to see lives being saved," he said.

The petition, signed by all 53 member groups of the coalition, will be delivered to the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, where the AU meeting is being held, on Wednesday.

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