Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The New York Times - November 29, 2006
Elisabeth Rosenthal
"The rhetoric from public health officials is good, but the follow-through is abysmal," said Gregg Gonsalves, who coordinated the report for the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition. "We are woefully behind in our targets."
The United Nations and the Group of 8 industrialized nations have set universal access to AIDS medicines as a goal for 2010, planning to have 9.8 million people in treatment by then. But given current trends, the world will fall 5 million short of that goal, the coalition said.
The shortfall is particularly glaring when it comes to women and children, the researchers found. Programs to use drugs to prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus from mother to child at the time of birth are reaching only 9 percent of HIV-positive women in Africa, even though the drugs are cheap and readily available, they noted.
At a news conference to release the study, Anurita Bains, special assistant to Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa, said, "Nothing has changed for women," and added, "What we find in the report is that children continue to be neglected."
Officials from two other advocacy groups, the Global AIDS Alliance and the World Action Campaign, underscored the same problem in a separate news conference. "Despite new investment, the world is not on track to meet basic goals adopted earlier this year regarding access to AIDS prevention care and treatment," they said in a joint statement.
Researchers for the treatment preparedness coalition looked closely at six nations with high rates of HIV -- the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia and India. Progress in treating patients was disappointing in all of them.
In India, only 5,595 children were given a diagnosis of HIV, even though experts estimate that 200,000 are infected.
In Nigeria, fewer than 100,000 people were getting the antiretroviral drugs that combat AIDS, though the government had planned to have more than twice as many in treatment by the middle of this year.
Chris Collins, a member of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, said the number of people receiving drugs was "dwarfed by the number of people in need." Bains said the main fund that supports AIDS treatment in poor countries -- the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- is already $1 billion short for 2007.
Advocates added that programs would have to focus more specifically on women. Young girls are five times as likely to become HIV-positive as young boys, Mary Robinson, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said at the Global AIDS Alliance news conference.
Girls may be forced to have sex to buy food, pay for education or please teachers, so HIV "is about power relationships," Robinson said.
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