AIDS treatment capacity overwhelmed, says NGO official

The number of Ugandans who become infected with the HI virus and those who develop AIDS annually has overwhelmed treatment capacity despite the declining prevalence of the disease across the country, the head of an AIDS support NGO said. "Uganda has 100,000 new infections every year and 50,000 people develop AIDS every year out of the 800,000 who carry the virus," the executive director of The Aids Support Organization (TASO), Alex Coutinho, said on Friday. "[The] HIV prevalence has gone down to 6 percent from 30 percent in the early 1990s, but the number of people developing AIDS is increasing and there is a lot of pressure for us to provide support," he added. "The epidemic is going down but the number of people developing AIDS is going up and AIDS charities are overwhelmed by the numbers." Speaking at the opening of a new treatment facility funded by American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in the southwestern town of Mbarara, Coutinho said charities manning treatment and counselling services were facing a huge challenge in coping with the increasing numbers of the sick. "In the past, people who had AIDS just died. Now people's lives have been prolonged by the drugs. As we scale up the treatment for new entrants, we have to look after people who are already on treatment," he said. "We have over 65,000 people on treatment for ARVs [antiretrovirals] and yet we have to cope with another 50,000 we expect to get sick annually," he added. The new US $700,000 three-floor centre, half of which was funded by Pfizer, is the second of four TASO regional facilities to be upgraded in Uganda. In addition to scaling-up ARV therapy to patients in the area, the centre also hosts a CD4 count laboratory that supports clients from two other centres in the region. "The facility will boost our capacity by 100 percent, increasing patient medical sessions to 50,000 in 2006 and counselling sessions to 15,000 - up by 60 percent," Coutinho said. He said TASO had handled 140,000 AIDS patients since its inception in 1987, 90,000 of whom had died. Pfizer chairman Hank McKinnell, who officiated at the opening, told reporters that, "as the world's largest pharmaceutical company, we have to play a role in the fight against AIDS. We either sit down and people die or we join to save lives." "We can make a difference in the fight against AIDS. Thinking about what we can do to fight AIDS, we know that the task is enormous with 28 million people being HIV-positive[...] Most people with AIDS do not live in cities; they live in villages and that is why we are funding this facility which is situated in a rural area," McKinnell added. Pfizer funded another AIDS treatment and training centre at Uganda’s main referral facility, Mulago Hospital, in the capital, Kampala, with 13,000 clients. Over 300 physicians from 15 African countries have been trained at the centre. "The battle to fight HIV/AIDS will not be won in years or in decades, it will take a long time because the problem is enormous. But together with different partners we can win the war," McKinnell said. Uganda was once seen as the epicentre of the AIDS pandemic in Africa in the 1980s, but has significantly reduced its infection rates through a government-driven campaign that placed great emphasis on HIV testing and the so-called ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and use a Condom) approach. The country has, however, seen close to one million people die due to the pandemic, according to government and UNAIDS statistics.