President confident of halting spread of HIV/AIDS

President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, where two million people are infected with the HIV virus, has said he is confident the country should be able to reverse the spread of the disease in the next five years, given the current level of nationwide mobilisation against the epidemic. “We are now at a stage of all-round mobilisation that will result in the total reversal of the trend in the next five years,” the UNDP quoted Mkapa as saying at a press conference in New York last week to coincide with the UN General Assembly’s special session on HIV/AIDS. Stressing that leadership was imperative in confronting the spread of the epidemic, Mkapa said his government was committed to promoting prevention efforts and caring for patients and orphans seeking treatment. The Tanzanian government has embarked on a major public education campaign involving religious leaders, youth and community groups, to tackle the problems associated with fear and ignorance of the disease. “We have been quite open with religious leaders - asking them to help us out in generating awareness of the danger of HIV/AIDS,” Mkapa told journalists in New York last week. “The government has been encouraging people to go for testing.” In addition to prevention and treatment, the head of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS has been exploring ways to develop partnerships with regional and international AIDS research groups for the development of an AIDS vaccine, based on sub-types of the HIV virus prevalent in the region. Tanzania was addressing poverty, which was a risk factor for and a result of HIV/AIDS, through a macroeconomic reform programme in place over the past five years, Mkapa said. “Under these reforms, Tanzania’s economy has started to grow,” he said. “It attained a 4.5 percent growth rate last year and should reach 8 percent by the year 2004.” The AIDS pandemic was undermining the economies of the hardest-hit countries and reversing gains in reducing poverty, the UNDP warned last week in a new report, “HIV/AIDS: Implications for Poverty Reduction”. Some countries could see their GNP shrink by up to 40 percent within 20 years, jeopardising UN targets to halve poverty by 2015, according to the report. The report was the focus of a panel, chaired by UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown yesterday, at the UN General Assembly special session on HIV/AIDS in New York. “The evidence from household surveys in hard-hit countries shows that when a breadwinner dies from HIV/AIDS, the household income falls by 50 percent to 80 percent, pushing families deeper into poverty,” said Brown. The loss of productive labour was cutting these countries’ GNP by up to 2 percent per year, he said. “Action is needed to protect hard-won gains in reducing poverty from the toll of HIV/AIDS,” he added. The joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, has estimated that about 8 percent of Tanzanian teenagers and adults (15 to 49 years) are infected with HIV. “Although this rate is less than the hardest-hit countries in southern Africa, Tanzania still faces a great challenge in efforts to stem the epidemic,” according to the UNDP. Reverend Gideon Byamugisha of Uganda said at the UN General Assembly session last week that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic was now on the global agenda, good intentions had not been matched by allocation of resources at the national and international levels, and that poverty reduction was being undermined by both HIV/AIDS, and unfavourable terms of international trade. “AIDS is not just a disease. It is a symptom of the way we relate to each other in the global village: it represents injustice, inequality and marginalisation,” he said. Given the epidemic, “should we be asking for debt reduction or debt cancellation for poor countries?” Byamugisha asked. ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said the link between AIDS and poverty was clear. The main linkage was the impact on women, with the feminisation of poverty, he said. “We also see that the crisis of 13 million children orphaned by AIDS also intensifies the problem of child labour,” Somavia added. Back in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, on 30 June, Mkapa said his government planned to make anti-retroviral drugs available to all Tanzania’s estimated three million HIV/AIDS patients, and needed US $1 billion a year to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “This is a very heavy burden for us, because the amount is equivalent to the government’s annual revenue collection,” the BBC quoted him as saying. Mkapa urged other African countries, as well as pharmaceutical companies, to step up efforts to stop the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. “We must now rise up to the challenge and [take] collective responsibility for saving ourselves and our society from imminent extinction,” he added. [For other IRIN reports on HIV/AIDS, go to ‘Plus News’ at: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN/hiv_aids/hivfp.phtml]