AIDS: Africa is dying from AIDS and corporate greed
AIDS is back in the headlines – briefly. The 1 December is international AIDS day and this year the situation facing millions in Africa is grimmer than ever.
The raw facts show the global scale of the epidemic:
In 1999 there were:
• 5.4 million people newly infected with HIV
• 34.3 million people living with HIV/AIDS, including 1.3 million children
• 2.8 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths, one third of them from associated TB
Since the start of the epidemic
• 18.8 million people have died
• 13.2 million children have been orphaned.
• In 1998 200,000 Africans died in wars. More than two million died of AIDS.
• 70 per cent of people living with HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa
• 16 per cent are in South and South-East Asia
• 4 per cent are in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
But the true toll was revealed by many reports to the Zimbabwe conference in July. In Zambia, education is threatened, with 1,300 teachers dying of AIDS in the first 10 months of 1998, the equivalent of two out of three newly-trained teachers each year.
Children cannot gain the most basic schooling because their parents have died, and they are left to bring up their younger brothers and sisters. An estimated 13.2 million children have been orphaned because of AIDS since the epidemic began. The proportion of children who are orphaned in developing countries has soared from an average of two per cent to between seven and 11 per cent.
The July conference was opened by South African President Thabo Mbeki. This sparked immediate controversy because he has voiced scepticism about the link between HIV and AIDS. He insists that poverty is the real problem.
He is wrong to doubt that HIV causes AIDS, and the dispute has delayed government action on funding treatment for people with HIV/AIDS.
The ANC-led government has effectively refused to fund treatment programmes, and, most controversially, failed to provide drug treatment to pregnant women in order to reduce the risk of transmission to their babies. As a result, 500 babies are infected daily in South Africa, while in the west effective interventions means that almost no children are now infected this way.
But for all the furore, Mbeki is right to link AIDS to poverty. HIV leads to AIDS, but its rapid spread through sub-Saharan Africa is not because of different genes or viral types in Africa. Social conditions hugely affect the risk of acquiring the disease. Millions of families in South Africa are separated for weeks on end to survive – for example men work in the mines away from their homes and living in appalling conditions reminiscent of 19th century workhouses in Britain.
Casual unprotected sex and prostitution flourish around these “barracks”. Other sexually transmitted infections are rampant due to absent or inadequate health services for the majority of workers in South Africa.
Once people have been infected, South Africa can’t afford the drugs that are now available to treat HIV. Although these drugs are not yet a cure, and have many side effects, they can turn HIV from a rapidly progressing fatal illness into a manageable long term condition. People with AIDS can now expect to live for 20 years rather than two. Given appropriate therapy, the transmission of the virus from mother to child can be cut to almost nil, and sexual transmission reduced.
Judge Edwin Cameron, a South African who is HIV-positive, spoke to the conference about his experience. He is one of the very few Africans who can afford the (US) $400 a month for combination therapy, and his health has been transformed. He said:
“But this near-miracle has not touched the lives of most of those who most desperately need it. . . .This is not because the drugs are prohibitively expensive to produce. They are not. Recent experience in India, Thailand and Brazil has shown that most of the critical drugs can be produced at costs that put them realistically within reach of the resource-poor world.
"The primary reason why the drugs are out of reach to the developing world is two-fold. On the one hand, drug-pricing structures imposed by the manufacturers make the drugs unaffordable. On the other, the international patent and trade regime at present seeks to choke off any large-scale attempt to produce and market the drugs at affordable levels. . . . This gathering can address the drug companies.
"It can demand not dialogue, but urgent and immediate price reductions for resource-poor countries. It can challenge the companies to permit without delay parallel imports and the manufacture under license of drugs for which they hold the patents. Corporately and individually we can address the governments and inter-governmental organisations of the world, demanding a plan of crisis intervention that will see treatments provided under managed conditions to those who most need them.”
The major drug companies have responded to pressure through a number of price cuts and special deals for poorer countries, but these are seen as temporary acts of charity to prevent any undermining of their profits. The conference itself was sponsored by such major pharmaceutical companies as DuPont, Pharmacia (incorporating Monsanto), Glaxo-Wellcome and Roche, along with other multinationals including Cisco, Dell and Microsoft.
There was a lot of protest around the conference, with a large coalition of groups supporting a global march for HIV/AIDS treatment, and backing a call demanding that:
“All people with HIV/AIDS have a right to access to these [combination] treatments in addition to health care, employment, education, clean water, adequate nutrition including vitamins and mineral supplements, and housing.
Denying people with HIV/AIDS access to affordable medicines in order to protect profits or intellectual property rights is tantamount to genocide.
Denying access to treatments or preventative intervention by any government body using the smokescreen of questioning the cause of AIDS is unacceptable.”
Activists around the world are starting to link issues of rights for sex workers, women’s and lesbian and gay liberation, and anti-racism with the struggle against international capitalism. AIDS activists have focused immediate attention on the drug companies, but this soon extends to the role governments and international institutions play in supporting exploitation and oppression. In Philadelphia, the Republican Convention was greeted with massive protests, featuring an ActUp banner which read “Bush and Drug Company Greed Kill: Generic AIDS Drugs for Africa Now!”
These protests need to be generalised and linked to the wider anti-capitalist movement.
[LRCI 1988]