Minnie Bruce Pratt, New York
Chanting "Bush lies, millions die", protesters at the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok on July 14 shouted down Randall Tobias, the US global AIDS coordinator and the former CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co.
An estimated 1000 activists staged a sit-down protest outside the conference. The focus of their outrage is a deadly and hypocritical US AIDS policy that promises help and delivers nothing.
The US health department cut the number of US representatives to the Bangkok conference to 60, drastically down from the 236 people who attended the 2002 International AIDS Conference in Barcelona.
Because of the cuts, seven Centers for Disease Control scientists scheduled to speak on studies about "men who have sex with men" were stopped from attending, and of the hundreds of other papers, organisers could only name four sessions that addressed gay and bisexual men.
AIDS is exponentially increasing into a global health catastrophe. As many as 38 million people worldwide are HIV-infected, with 25 million of those in sub-Saharan Africa and more than 7 million in Asia.
The pandemic has already claimed more than 28 million lives since AIDS was identified in 1981.
People can expect to live, on average, less than 40 years if they are born today in one of seven African countries with a high rate of HIV infection, including Swazi land, Lesotho, Zambia, Malawi, the Central African Republic and Mozambique.
In Zimbabwe, life expectancy has dropped more than 40% since 1990, to 33.9 years. In South Africa, the continent's economic powerhouse, the average is 48.8 years.
HIV infection is growing at record rates in women and young people under 25, who represent over one-third of people living with HIV and AIDS worldwide. Women are currently 48% of HIV cases.
In the Asia-Pacific region, a large increase in AIDS is occurring among women aged 15 to 29 whose husbands have become infected.
The Bush administration pledged US$15 billion in 2003 to combat AIDS for the following five years in Vietnam plus 14 countries in Africa and the Caribbean.
One-third of the 2003 US funding for HIV prevention must be spent on abstinence-only programs. President George Bush has set the official US health policy response to AIDS as an "ABC" approach. In a recent speech in a Philadelphia church, he defined this as: "Abstain, be faithful in marriage, and, when appropriate, use condoms."
But a Columbia University study of 12,000 teenagers refuted the claim that this approach can effectively stop sexually transmitted diseases. The study found that those who pledged to abstain from sex until marriage became infected at the same rate as non-pledgers.
Money from the Bush AIDS package also mandates that funds can only be spent to provide and administer drugs already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and marketed by US drug companies. The FDA has not approved any cheaper generic AIDS drugs, which have been okayed by the World Health Organisation.
FDA-approved drugs usually cost $700 per person per year. Generic drugs can cost as little as $150, according to Joia Mukherjee, with Partners in Health in Haiti. The higher-priced, anti-retroviral patented drugs, which can cut AIDS deaths, are unaffordable in underdeveloped nations.
French President Jacques Chirac issued a written statement to the July 14 Bangkok conference charging that the Bush administration has pressured underdeveloped countries to stop production of generic HIV drugs in exchange for free-trade agreements with the US.
Richard Parker, chairperson of the Department of Socio-Medical Sciences at Columbia University, was quoted by the July 16 New York Blade as saying: "The US has got a bad reputation all over the world as not defending the interest of vulnerable people and communities, but instead of big business."
[Abridged from <http://workers.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 4, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.