Tag: AIDS/HIV

AIDS Epidemic Looming on the Horizon for Papua New Guinea

A report By Australian agency AusAid predicts that unless Papua New Guinea takes action to reduce its AIDS infection rate, it could face a devastating epidemic over the next two decades.

Currently about 15,000 people are HIV positive out of the 4.6 million population, but the HIV infection rate is increasing by as much as 30 percent every year.

If that trend continues, more than 40 percent of the adult population could wind up infected within the next 20 years.

According to AusAID this would have a disastrous economic impact since the small nation would lose large numbers of able bodied workers.

Australia plans to spend $30 million over the next five years on a program to treat and reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, and the government of Papua New Guinea has created a national agency to tackle the problem.

Source:

Papua New Guinea and HIV/AIDS. AusAid, December 19, 2000.

PNG faces Aids epidemic. Phil Mercer, The BBC, May 14, 2002.

Cases of HIV in India Could Surpass South Africa

While per capita HIV infection rates in India will likely never reach the levels found in South Africa, India is well on its way to surpassing South Africa’s tally of total AIDS cases.

Currently, the infection rate in India is estimated at only 0.7 percent. But with a population topping a billion people, that translates to 3.8 million adult cases in India compared to South Africa’s 4.7 million cases.

Even with the relatively low infection rate, this is an enormous number of cases that will strain the ability of India’s health care system to respond.

As in Africa, a mixture of denial and lack of openness about the disease has helped it spread. In some areas, such as the western state of Maharashta, as much as 2 percent of the adult population is HIV positive. That may not compare to South Africa’s 20 percent infection rate, but is high compared to a country such as the United States where HIV prevalence is only 0.61 percent (and where the prevalence is due in part to the long survival times of HIV positive individuals thanks to expensive drug regimens).

Source:

Indian HIV ‘could pass South Africa’. The BBC, May 2, 2002.

Life Expectancy in Africa Continues Decline

Africa is the only region, to my knowledge, in which the life expectancy has been declining over the past two decades, and it looks like the life expectancy there will continue to decline for the forseeable future.

According to a recent conference on African population issues held in Ethiopia, average life expectancy in Africa has declined by almost 15 years over the past two decades. The biggest culprit is infectious disease. AIDS and other infectious diseases are pushing life expectancy to extremely low rates in several African countries.

In both Botswana and Malawi, for example, life expectancy is below 40 years according to UNAIDS. By 2005, according to the recent conference, life expectancy for Africa as a whole be only 48 years, compared to 74.9 and 81.2 years for European men and women respectively.

Source:

Life expectancy still falling in Africa. The BB, February 11, 2002.

China’s Bizarre Ban on Condom Advertising

For a country that officially bars many couples from having more than one children, you might think that China would promote contraception measures such as condoms. You would be mistaken. Believe it or not, The State Administration for Industry and Commerce has banned advertising for condoms since 1989 under regulations that prohibit “any products meant to cure sexual dysfunction or help improve people’s sex life.”

The ban is enforced to the point that when China Central Television ran a public service announcement in 1999 touting condoms for birth control and disease prevention, the ads were quickly taken off the air. One of the effects of such a bizarre policy is that China may be in the midst of a runaway HIV epidemic.

Officially there are already 600,000 HIV positive persons in China, though international health agencies suspect that number might be as high as 1 million. Moreover, the number of cases is quickly accelerating. The number of official cases jumped 67 percent from 2000 to 2001.

Surveys of Chinese attitudes toward HIV reveal that few people in China know much about the disease. In a study conducted in 2000 by the State Family Planning Commission, 20 percent of those surveyed had never heard of AIDS, and 50 percent did not know that the disease could be transmitted by sex.

Chinese media, including the official Communist Party organ The People’s Daily recently called for a lifting of the ban on condom advertising. Hopefully the government will follow suit and begin a massive education campaign about and allow such advertising, or China could face the sort of pandemic that is now afflicting sub-Saharan Africa.

Source:

With ignorance as the fuel, AIDS speeds across China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 30, 2001.

China lets condoms out of the closet. John Schauble, TheAge.Com, January 1, 2002.

Do Drug Patents Present a Major Obstacle to AIDS Treatment in Africa?

For the past several years AIDS activists have charged that patents on HIV antivirals has significantly harmed the ability of African nations to respond to the AIDS crisis. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however, suggests that this is simply not the case.

Researcher Amir Attaran, an adjunct lecturer in public policy and a researcher at the Center for International Development, examined the status of patents on anti-AIDS drugs and found that, in fact, most such drugs were not patented in African nations. Looking at the patent status of 15 drugs in 53 African countries, they found only 172 actually existing patents for such drugs out of the 795 patents that might exist. In fact, in several African countries there were no patents on any existing HIV drugs — and, therefore, no legal barriers to using generic versions of patented AIDS drugs — but almost no treatment of AIDS patients with those antivirals.

Not surprisingly, the real obstacle to treating HIV in Africa is the continent’s endemic poverty. According to Attaran, even with generics AIDS treatment is still going to cost $350 per person in countries that typically budget less than $10 per person in their health budgets.

Attaran could have also added to the obstacles state resistance to the reality of the AIDS epidemic. Just this month, for example, South Africa’s government stepped into a major controversy over its continuing suppression of an internal government report on the AIDS epidemic in that country. The report was suppressed largely because it called for the widespread use of anti-HIV drugs — an approach which continues to be opposed by South African president Thabo Mbeki (Mbeki has, in the past, turned down large donations of HIV drugs in accordance with this policy).

Sources:

One Expert’s Opinion: Amir Attaran Says New Study Shows that Patents Are Not the Obstacle to HIV Treatment in Africa. Kennedy School of Government (Harvard), Press Release, October 22, 2001.

Do patents for antiretroviral drugs constrain access to AIDS treatment in Africa? Amir Attaran, Lee Gillespie-White, Journal of the American Medical Association, 2001;286:1886-1892.