Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - Thursday, May 13, 1999
Eric Rosenberg, Examiner Washington Bureau
Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., the chairman of a congressional task force on the international scope of AIDS and HIV, said Wednesday that "the general health of the developing world has suffered a setback unlike any other."
"Africa has been the hardest hit, but now there is evidence that Asia is on the brink and will soon be plunged into a crisis many times worse than Africa," McDermott told a House conference on AIDS.
Citing U.N. statistics, McDermott stated that in Africa and Asia HIV infection rates were four times higher in the military than in the civilian populations.
"This will soon lead to a major destabilization of militaries throughout the developing world," he said. "If the United States is to help maintain global security, then we as a nation must realize that HIV-AIDS could have a massive and very negative effect on global security."
Former Rep. Ronald Dellums, D-Oakland, a 27-year House veteran who now heads Atlanta-based Healthcare International Management Co., a company that provides health services in poor countries, warned that AIDS was sowing seeds of political instability in Africa by creating a generation of hopeless and impoverished orphans.
Dellums called for the creation of an "AIDS Marshall Plan" focused on Africa. He wants the federal government and pharmaceutical companies each to chip in $100 million. The money would help pay for expensive anti-viral drugs that have dramatically lowered death rates from the disease in wealthy countries. The so-called triple drug therapy costs over $15,000 annually per patient in the United States, but the average amount of money available to an HIV-infected person in a poor nation is about $10 per year.
The U.S. government currently provides about $125 million annually for international HIV and AIDS efforts, aimed mainly at prevention programs. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who has introduced a bill in the House that would provide tax breaks for companies doing research on AIDS vaccines, urged the heads of the world's wealthiest countries to hold a meeting devoted to stemming the spread of AIDS in the developing world.
Seth Berkeley, the director of the New York-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, added that the most effective way to curtail the rapid spread of the disease in poor countries would be the development of an AIDS vaccine. In the 18 years since the epidemic exploded onto the scene, an estimated 34 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa have been infected with HIV. About 11.5 million of those people have died, a quarter of them children.
According to the World Health Organization, 83 percent of worldwide AIDS deaths have occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, and at least 95 percent of all children whose parents died of AIDS are African.
The WHO reported this week that AIDS had become the world's most deadly infectious disease in the last year.
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