Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 13 July 1996
Joanne Kenen
Drugs can now buy time.
Not everyone can buy the drugs.
But to Dr. Peter Piot, head of the Geneva-based UNAIDS, a wake-up call, however belated, paves the way for action.
"I was surprised it happened now -- the differences between the developed and the developing world, with HIV and other disease, are not a new phenonemen," he told Reuters in an interview this week.
"But that awareness is giving us momentum now, and we don't want to lose it," said Piot, adding that negotiations for price cuts and bulk sales have already started between some AIDS-struck nations like Brazil and certain big pharmaceutical companies, which he did not identify.
"I'm not asking them to sell them for less than it costs to make it, including the research," he said. "I'm not Don Quixote."
The new drug regimes hold out the hope of longer and healthier lives for people living with AIDS. But they also cost around $15,000 a year, underscoring the gap between rich countries and poor.
Piot is encouraging clinical trials and "compassionate access" programmes in poor countries, where 90 percent of the nearly 22 million HIV-infected people live. Both would help people with AIDS get some access to cutting-edge therapies as well as to more affordable medicine for the painful and debilitating "opportunistic infections" that plague them.
Noting that there are many slightly different strains of HIV around the world, experts say international research makes sense scientifically as well as morally.
"The virus spread and adaptation is independent of geographic borders," said Deborah Birx of the U.S. Walter Reed Army Institute. "HIV research much be global."
From a scientific point of view, the conference highlights were laboratory findings that have led doctors to believe that they may actually be able to conquer the complex and mercurial virus that until now has always changed and mutated to stay a step ahead of them.
From a human point of view, no-one at the conference embodied the chasm between breakthroughs in a lab and the cold realities of life with AIDS better than Katherine Nyirenda, a 24-year-old HIV-infected mother of two who travelled here from Lusaka, Zambia.
"One world, one hope? It (hope) is out for me," she said.
"Do not give the tests -- if you do not give the treatment."
Moved by her plight and chastised when she pointed out that she could feed her children to adulthood for the price of her airfare here, people in her audience took up a collection for her. But conference organisers pleaded with them to remember that there were millions of Katherine Nyirendas around the world.
It would cost billions to get them anti-viral and protease inhibitor drugs. But researchers noted that there are some affordable weapons against a scourge that is infecting 8,500 people each day.
"Every one of those 8,500 infections is avoidable with safe and cheap means," said Dr. Michael Rekart, one of the conference co-chairs.
The conference also heard urgent calls for more work on a vaccine, particularly one that will work on the types of HIV common in Asia and Africa.
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