The XVI International Aids Conference finished recently in Toronto, so now that Lebanon is no longer taking all our attention (pace the post of Aug 9th) it seems a good moment to focus again on that disease.
The signals from the conference are mixed. On the one hand, there is more funding available for tackling Aids and its attendant scourge TB than ever before. On the other, there is still far less than is needed, and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria is still all but skint. Attention has shifted away from Aids and TB since the Gleneagles summit last year - unless you have a particular interest in the subject you are unlikely to have noticed that the conference was going on. The Canadian Prime Minister did not come, even though it's not very far from Ottawa to Totonto, nor does our Department for International Development seem to have thought it a sufficient priority for Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State to attend - indeed, I'm not at all sure that anybody from DfID attended.
The one thing that might have caught your attention from the conference was the attendance of the two Bills: Clinton and Gates. You can see a video of the session at which they first addressed a plenary session then answered questions, or read the transcript, or even get a podcast, here. Also worth listening to is a session including Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Aids to Africa (always worth hearing, but relatively muted this time - though he still lays into the G8 governments), Richard Feachem of the Global Fund, Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, and several others. Click here for that one.
An interesting aspect was that Bill Gates wound himself up to criticise PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is run on right-wing evangelical Christian lines: no condoms, and if your organisation has ever mentioned abortion you won't see any money from PEPFAR. Gates praised it with faint damns, but it still represented a new departure for him. US Presidents tend to be beyond criticism - particularly when they're giving money away (which this one does particularly infrequently!). The problem he pointed to is one of empowerment, or rather the lack of it: women in Africa rarely get a say even in whether or not to have sex, let alone in whether or not to use a condom. As Gates memorably put it: "a woman should not have to ask permission to save her own life".
The overall impression of the conference, though, is of the chronic insufficiency of funding. The WHO's "3 by 5" campaign (to have 3 million people receiveng ARV treatment by 2005) failed on account of it. Children are particularly badly hit: nobody has bothered to make child-sized doses of any of the treatments, so they have to take broken-up pills. Only 6% of those receiving drugs are children, though 14% of patients are. We are going to need new drugs soon, as the virus develops resistance to the old ones, and microbicides to help women avoid infection, and ultimately either a cure or a vaccine or preferably both. Gates is putting his considerable financial resources into the search for all of them, but even he can't do it alone.
Where are the governments when you need them?
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