AlertNet Deputy Editor Tim Large is at the 15th International AIDS Conference, a week-long gathering of scientists, politicians, drug makers and activists trying to tackle the global scourge of HIV/AIDS. Here are tidbits from his notebook on the first working day of the biggest AIDS meeting in history.Monday, July 12, 2004
Interview with Paisan Suwannawong, a former heroine addict and director of the Thai Treatment Action Group. Paisan was a speaker at the conference’s opening ceremony on Sunday. He was the last to take the mike, after U.N. chief Kofi Annan and Thai PM Thaksin Shinawatra had left the stage. He believes his place on the billing was a calculated attempt by organisers to marginalise his message.
“Clearly no one gives a shit,” he tells me. “It hurts so much.”
Wearing a “Drug users have rights too” t-shirt, Paisan is an eloquent spokesman for Thai addicts living with HIV. The injecting drug-user community has a staggering 50 percent infection rate.
Addicts suffered enormously in the government’s recent “war on drugs”, in which more than 50,000 users were arrested, hundreds of thousands forced into military-run rehab centres and many more driven underground. Rights groups say 2,000-3,000 were killed in extra-judicial executions in just three months.
At Sunday’s opening cereomy, PM Thaksin said times had changed, that addicts were to be seen as “patients” rather than criminals.
“It’s a lie,” Paisan says. “I’m sick of the claim that drug users are patients. Why is there no methadone? Why are we forced into rehab centres? If you don’t go, they put you in jail. What kind of ‘patient’ is that?”
Paisan’s story is as heartbreaking as it is typical. He grew up in one of Bangkok’s biggest slums, where he became hooked on heroin. He was arrested twice. In prison, drugs were so rife he could inject two or three times a day with shared needles.
Paisan kicked drugs 13 years ago. Shortly after that he tested positive for HIV. He cannot afford life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs. “So many of my friends have died of HIV,” he says.
PUNCH-UP OVER PATENTS
Oxfam stages a traditional Thai kick-boxing fight outside the convention centre. The combatants are the United States and Thailand (USA loses).
It’s all about drawing attention to free trade talks between the two countries that Oxfam says threaten HIV treatment by toughening intellectual property protection for drugs made by big pharmaceutical firms.
“If Thailand is to scale up its AIDS treatment programme, it must be allowed access to cheap generic versions of patented drugs in the future, otherwise one of the world’s success stories will fail,” says Oxfam Health Policy Advisor Mohga Kamal Smith.
Thai PM Thaksin has pledged to leave HIV drugs out of FTA negotiations, but Oxfam and other NGOs are sceptical. Even if he does, Mohga says, would the exemption apply to drugs used for treating AIDS-related conditions? Her guess: Not likely.
See Oxfam’s new report, Free Trade Agreement between the USA and Thailand threatens access to HIV/AIDS treatment.
’GUILTY AS CHARGED’
More protests. Activists splatter big Wanted posters of G7 leaders with red paint, accusing them of “deadly stinginess” in the fight against AIDS and chanting “Guilty! Guilty!” They hold mock trials and issue “international warrants for citizens’ arrest”.
Demonstrators from a group called Act Up Paris charge Bush with pledging $10 billion a year to tackle AIDS but only coughing up $580 million so far. Other rich countries have come up with less. Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, contributes $125 million a year to the global fight. Number three, Germany, gives $120 million.
HOLLYWOOD HAVOC
Activists also gets stuck into Hollywood heartthrob Richard Gere, head of the Gere Foundation (http://www.gerefoundation.org/), at a session aimed at letting the public quiz high-profile players in the struggle to stop AIDS. In doing so, they take a swipe at the movement to relax patents on AIDS drugs.
As hundreds fill an arena to see the “Pretty Woman” star alongside former Irish President Mary Robinson and Thai nun Sansanec Stienrasuta, they hand out leaflets calling for Gere and movie maker Paramount Pictures to relinquish property rights they hold over his films to the public.
“Sound absurd? It is certainly no more absurd than the demand that innovators who have invested time and money to develop new drugs…simply relinquish control of them,” the leaflet says.
It adds, tongue in cheek: “We can only assume his appearance here is atonement for producing multiple films that glorify prostitution and trivialise sexual responsibility, indirectly contributing to the spread of AIDS.”
TB OR NOT TB
Brief chat with Joanne Carter, legislative director for grassroots organisation Results International. She makes the point that you can’t fight AIDS without taking on TB, which kills up to 50 percent of people with HIV. Given that TB is the planet’s biggest curable infectious disease, it’s surprising how often it’s lost in HIV’s shadow.
“What’s really insane is that TB drugs cost $10 for a full treatment, but in Africa, the U.N. World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates 70 percent of people infected don’t have access to TB drugs,” she says. “It’s insane. If somebody with AIDS gets TB, they’ll literally be dead within weeks or a couple of months. TB treatments can extend that to years.”
Citing Open Society Institute figures, Carter says 60 percent of TB patients in Zambia are HIV positive. In Botswana, the number is 80 percent. “One person with TB, even in a low prevalence rate, will infect 15 other people in a year.”
See the Open Society Institute’s report, Integrating HIV/AIDS and TB Efforts: The Challenge for the President’s AIDS Initiative.
CAMPAIGN TO SAVE NURSES
Several Bulgarian nurses have been sentenced to death for murder in Libya after an investigation into the HIV contamination of 470 children at a hospital. Members of a campaign to save the nurses say they were wrongly charged.
“The error comes from the deafening silence surrounding HIV transmission in and outside the health-care setting through re-use of dirty syringes and other unsafe healthcare practices,” health care workers say in a statement.
The campaigners estimate that a million HIV infections in China are due to the unsafe use of syringes. They call for better training and materials to stop the accidental transmission of HIV in hospitals.
AIDS IN THE MILITARY
UNAIDS teams up with several Thai ministries to tackle HIV/AIDS in the military -- recognition that soldiers globally are two to five times more likely to contract sexually transmitted infections than civilians in peacetime. During conflict, that risk can soar by a factor of 50.
Research by UNAIDS shows that HIV prevalence rates in the Thai military fell 75 percent in the period 1993-2003 – to one percent from four percent. But the organisation warned against complacency.
By enlisting UNAIDS’ help, Thailand joins a growing list of countries including Mozambique, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay that are trying to tackle AIDS in the armed forces.
Activists from a non-governmental organisation (NGO) attend an AIDS awareness campaign on the eve of the World AIDS Day at Nalsarovar Bird Sanctuary Lake, about 60 km (37 miles) west of ...
