The Economics Of AIDS
July 8, 2002
The Barcelona International AIDS conference began its first full day on Monday with a packed schedule of scientific briefings and updates on AIDS.
Bernhard Schwartländer, director of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization, said more than 20 percent of adults in seven sub-Saharan African countries had the virus that causes AIDS. In Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe the rate is one in three.
Schwartländer warned that the loss of workers due to AIDS could hurt economic growth and undermine key sectors of society in the worst-hit countries. "By 2020, more than 25 percent of the workforce in some countries may be lost to AIDS," he said.
Already in Kenya, AIDS accounts for up to three of every four deaths in the police force, Schwartländer said. Swaziland would have to train 13,000 new teachers over the next 17 years to maintain services - 7,000 more than if there were no AIDS deaths.
Asia is a further region particularly threatened by the deadly epidemic. Health experts told the international conference that Asia is sweeping AIDS under the carpet, endangering the lives of millions in the world's two most populous countries, China and India.
New hope
Activists and officials were united in calling for cheap, life-saving drugs to be made available to fight AIDS in poor countries.
The US biotechnology company VaxGen Inc announced at the conference that it was working on a new vaccine against HIV/AIDS. It could be available by 2005 if results from human safety and efficacy trials are as good as expected, said Donald Francis, president and co-founder of the company.
Early results from Phase III trials of the vaccine will not be available until early next year. But Francis said VaxGen is optimistic it would work. "I think we will get protection (from the virus), but I don't know what level we will get," he told the delegates.
Treatment in the wrong place
A vaccine is considered the best hope of getting the rampant virus under control.
Drug cocktails that can reduce the virus to undetectable levels, so-called "anti-retroviral" drugs, can extend the lives of people with AIDS. But this is mainly the case in rich Western countries. Such treatment is hardly available in poor nations.
Many speakers at the Barcelona conference condemned the poor response to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's Global Aids Fund, intended to raise money to fight the epidemic. Less than $3 billion has so far been raised of the fund's $10 billion goal.
"We need more resources to be put into the global fund to be able to get this money to where people are suffering," Uganda's Milly Katana of the HIV/AIDS Community Movement said.
"If there is one thing that really should be globalized, that is the right to a healthy life," said Stefano Vella, President of the International AIDS Society.