Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - May 12, 2004
Gautam Naik, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Although countries, donors and other funding groups have pledged about $20 billion to stop the global spread of AIDS, the vital task is to use those funds to provide life-prolonging medicines to the patients who most urgently need it, says the report, released yesterday.
The key will be how rapidly individual countries -- many of which have weak health-care systems -- can boost their fledgling AIDS-treatment efforts and transform them into nationwide programs.
"Future generations will judge our era in large part by our response to the AIDS pandemic," said Lee Jong Wook, director-general of the WHO, an arm of the United Nations. "This is an historic opportunity we cannot afford to miss."
AIDS, which already has taken 20 million lives, now is the leading cause of death and lost years of productivity for adults ages 15 to 59, according to WHO, of Geneva. Currently, about 40 million people are infected by the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, and six million of those are in urgent need of medicine. As of late last year, just 400,000 patients were receiving the drugs.
Many hard-hit countries tend to focus more on HIV prevention rather than treatment, partly because antiretroviral drugs are expensive. The WHO hopes to change that. The centerpiece of its plan is an ambitious project to provide life-saving drugs to three million patients by 2005 at a total cost of about $5.5 billion. Launched in September, the initiative is backed by UNAids and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a Geneva funding group.
As part of that plan, the WHO hopes to raise an additional $218 million to fund its own activities for the project, including in-country staff training. On Monday, the Canadian government said it was contributing 100 million Canadian dollars (US$72 million) toward that goal.
A fundamental approach in the WHO's plan is to set up small-scale AIDS-treatment programs in the hardest-hit countries. Provided the initial two-year phase of the plan is successful, the agency hopes to expand the effort to provide treatment to the remaining three million patients under immediate threat and sustain that for the rest of their lives. In the longer term, the WHO wants its AIDS plan to be the basis for a wider improvement in the public-health systems of poorer countries, thereby making it easier for them to fight other killers, including tuberculosis and malaria.
Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com
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