Inter Press Service - September 7, 1999
Mark Bourrie

Almost 34 million people around the globe are infected with HIV - (human immunodeficiency virus) which leads to full-blown AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Nearly one-half of HIV suffers are women and children and 95 percent of all infected people live in the developing world, the Society observed at a conference here.

"What does this mean? It means we are going to have a lot of sick problems," said Mark Wainberg, president of the AIDS society.

Drugs developed in North America have proven to be effective in preventing the transfer of HIV from mothers to fetuses, said Wainberg, a physician who also who is director of McGill University's AIDS Centre in Montreal.

Doctors once agreed that the only drug that could help in preventing the transfer of HIV at birth was AZT, which costs about 40 US dollars per dose. But papers presented at the Montreal conference say the drug nevirapine can cut the transmission of the virus by half in the Third World at a cost of about 4 dollars per dose.

The drug, which attacks HIV's ability to reproduce itself, is approved for use in Canada and the United States and the new medication has virtually eliminated the "in utero" spread of AIDS in North America.

But the problem is getting the developed world to help with the cost and distribution of the drugs, said Dr. Arthur Ammann, the conference chairman.

"It is ironic that while we work hard to develop better and less expensive prevention treatments, the numbers keep getting larger and larger," he said. The Montreal conference was sponsored by the International AIDS Society and the American Foundation for AIDS Research, with the help of several other other health and research organizations.

The AIDS epidemic in such countries as Africa, India and China could be slowed if drugs were given to developing countries, and international assistance provided for orphanages,improving education and tackling the devastation left behind from HIV/AIDS, Amman said.

In India, there are an estimated 5 to 7 million people with HIV/AIDS - including some 80,000 to 160,000 infants, which is more than in any other country. In 10 years, the number of people with AIDS on the Indian subcontinent be higher than in all of Africa, the conference learned.

China currently had an estimated 500,000 people with HIV/AIDS but this could rise to 5 million in the next 10 years

In some southern African countries, HIV/AIDS has caused the over- all life expectancy to drop by as much as 25 years.There are estimates that about 8 million children are orphaned from AIDS. Unless mothers are treated, children born to infected mothers have a 33 per cent chance of getting the virus, the conference heard.

At a second AIDS conference in Windhoek, Namibia, last week, African health ministers declared themselves to be determined to stop the spread of AIDs by investing in intensive awareness campaigns and the promotion of abstinence, fidelity and condom use in a bid to stem the spread of the disease.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) sponsored the African meeting which focussed on the spread of AIDS from eastern and central Africa to the rest of the continent, and the explosion in the number of infections in India and China. The conference was told that the only African country to see a decline in infections was Uganda, where a huge death toll and public education have combined to frighten the population into taking precautions against the disease.

In 1992, 17 percent of sexually active teenage girls in Uganda were HIV positive The rate fell to about six percent at the end of 1998.

Namibian Health Minister Libertina Amathila agreed, said awareness campaigns work, but not quickly enough to result in large drops in numbers. "I hope that if we really intensify (awareness campaigns), we are going to go down with this, but it will not happen next year," she said.

WHO surveys showed that 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were currently infected with HIV/AIDS. In central Africa, HIV reached a maximum rate of infection rate of about 30 percent of the population before it stabilised. In southern Africa, about 12 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV, according to UN statistics, but those numbers are increasing quickly.
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