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HIV: Africa's 21st Century Plague
In Sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS can best be described as a 21st century plague. Approximately 28 million people there are HIV positive. Last year 3.4 million adults and children in the region were infected with HIV and 2.3 million died from AIDS-related causes. In some communities along the Zimbabwe-South Africa border, it is estimated that 70 percent of adults are HIV positive.
If current trends continue, HIV/AIDS will not just cause immeasurable anguish and suffering among Africa's millions, but it could destabilize entire societies as sizable percentages of their populations (doctors, teachers, truck drivers, professors, business leaders, etc.) perish.
Viewed superficially, the solution to the world AIDS problem appears relatively easy: simply take the drugs available in developed nations that slow the progress of HIV/AIDS and distribute them to poorer countries. But at stake in the current AIDS crisis are not just millions of lives but millions of dollars and, according to some, a precedent that might impact the rules of intellectual property and international trade for years to come.
HIV Basics
HIV doesn't kill people, it infects people's immune systems. Bodies with significantly debilitated immune systems can die of infections that healthy immune systems simply fight off (these include pneumonia, blood stream infections, meningitis and others). AIDS is a term used to describe HIV-infected people with immune systems that have been severely compromised.
To date, there is no cure for HIV. In other words, once HIV positive, always HIV positive. However, there are a number of drugs which, when taken together in the right sequence and combinations, can keep HIV suppressed — so suppressed that many people have been taking these "drug cocktails" for years and have yet to develop AIDS.
But there are also risks involved with this treatment, also known as 'triple therapy.' First, if a patient stops taking the drugs, even for one day, the virus will rear its ugly head and start replicating again. Second, if a patient goes back on triple therapy after stopping, the virus will have mutated against it. Thus the patient has burned a bridge and that treatment won't be effective ever again. Moreover, he or she now has a more sophisticated version of the virus, which could be passed on to others.
The Challenge of Administering Treatment
The challenge facing the world's poorest countries isn't simply getting the right drugs to the right people, but finding a way to make sure they are taken properly and consistently. For years the big American and European drug companies have contended that it is reckless to allow countries with little or no health care systems to have access to their treatments because they would not be administered correctly.
AIDS activists point to Brazil as a nation in the developing world, which had a shabby health care infrastructure for years but whose government has successfully administered triple therapy to citizens infected with HIV. In part because of that, the rate at which Brazilians were dying from AIDS-related complications was on the decline as of January 2001.
Government infrastructures in most Sub-Saharan nations are inferior to that in Brazil, however, and doubts remain as to whether they will be able to oversee the implementation of triple therapy on a mass scale without significant outside assistance.
There have been some hopeful signs in the last year. Two studies, conducted on volunteers in the African nations of Senegal and the Ivory Coast, showed that triple therapy was effective, at least on a small scale. The vast majority of those taking part in the survey saw detectable levels of the virus recede significantly, a sign that they were capable to sticking to the triple therapy regimen diligently.
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Photo: MTV News & Docs
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