Annan envoy welcomes leadership on HIV/AIDS

Kenya was among the African countries waging a determined effort to battle the HIV/AIDS pandemic, offering hope that it could be reversed and even defeated, according to Stephen Lewis, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Lewis was speaking to journalists at the UN’s headquarters in New York, USA, on Monday, after returning from a fact-finding trip to three African countries: Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria. “We’ve all heard of the alleged crippling constraints - from the tatters of the health infrastructure, to the absence of human resources, to bureaucracy that doesn’t work,” he said. “There is a lot of truth about those constraints, but I want to say for one that it is a cruel and reckless distortion of reality to assume that the constraints must inhibit all intervention. There is tremendous progress which can now be made in the face of the obstacles - and indeed the entire continent can re-embrace survival and flourish if we overcome the obstacles,” Lewis added.

In Kenya, the government had paved the way for importing or even producing anti-retroviral drugs, while “impressive” efforts were continuing to produce a vaccine. Lewis also cited among the reasons for his optimism the “extraordinary and pervasive sense of awareness which now exists in country after country” that he visited. National leaders had “undoubtedly overcome the denial which was explicit before” and were now committed to battling the disease, he said.