IRIN PlusNews HIV/AIDS Briefs, 15 August 2001

CONTENTS: AFRICA: Cuba Seeks Funds to Send AIDS-Fighting Doctors to Africa SOUTH AFRICA: Treatment Action Campaign takes government to court on AIDS drug AFRICA: Cuba Seeks Funds to Send AIDS- Fighting Doctors to Africa Cuba stands ready to send 4,000 doctors and health specialists to Africa in order to build an infrastructure to assist efforts to supply the population with HIV/AIDS medications as well as essential prescription and follow-up procedures, the news agency IPS reported on Tuesday. But analysts said that this could only happen if developed countries provided the necessary resources. So far, only Portugal, Belgium, France and the Canary Islands have expressed interest in setting up triangular cooperation agreements in order for the Cuban plan to be implemented in the African countries hardest hit by the AIDS pandemic. During a July visit to the capital Havana, Roman Rodriguez president of the regional government of the Canary Islands, was quoted as saying: “I am convinced that a proposal can be articulated from the Canaries, from the government of Spain, and from the European Union, if we had a clear path to follow.” Rodriguez expressed willingness to help Cuba, adding that the Canary Islands have never before engaged in any organised efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa despite them being situated just 100 km off the the continent’s western coast. He said the time had come to change his regional government’s lack of action on the matter, IPS reported. Vice-President Carlos Lage outlined the programme at the United Nations Special Session on HIV/AIDS in June this year, and presidential minister Ricardo Cabrisas subsequently presented it before the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Following his presentation at the UN headquarters in New York, Lage met with government representatives from Comoros, Kenya, Nigeria, Portugal, Senegal and Swaziland, and with officials from Brazil, France, Netherlands, South Africa and Uganda. “The international community would need only to provide the medications, equipment and material resources” for the services that Cuba would provide to HIV/AIDS patients in Africa, “at no profit whatsoever,” stated Lage. Concrete responses from most of the developeded countries consulted during that opportunity, have not yet been received by the Cuban government. SOUTH AFRICA: Treatment Action Campaign takes government to court on AIDS drug The South African AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), announced last week that it would take the government to court for denying HIV-positive pregnant women drugs that reduce the risk of transmitting the disease to their babies, Reuters reported on Wednesday. TAC said it would take legal action to pressure the government to roll out a national programme to distribute an antiretroviral drug called nevirapine to help reduce the number of South African children born with HIV, which now stands at 70,000 a year. “We are planning now to initiate legal action”, TAC national secretary Mark Heywood was quoted as saying. The group said the alarming number of children contracting the disease at birth from their mothers left it no option but to seek a court ruling to uphold citizens’ constitutional rights to proper health care and to dignity. “This is not an action which is anti-government but is in the interest of public health and AIDS prevention. It seeks to enforce the rights every South African is given under the constitution that the liberation struggle brought about,” Heywood said. South Africa has started trials of nevirapine at 18 sites but has not introduced the drug across the country. According to the Department of Health, the trials are needed to address issues including the potential for drug resistance to nevirapine use, possible complications linked to breast feeding and the need for proper counselling facilities. TAC says the trial sites are no substitute for a national programme that would allow doctors to dispense the drug, made by Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim, to those in need. A study commissioned by the Department of Health and obtained by TAC revealed that a national programme of providing nevirapine for pregnant women would save 14,000 babies at a cost of US $10.5 million or just US $750 per child.