The UN Program on HIV/AIDS will establish in Brazil the worlds first international AIDS center aimed at promoting the fight against the disease in developing countries, UNAIDS and Brazilian officials said Thursday, according to the World Bank press review Friday.
– We urgently need to identify new ways for countries to build technical capacity to tackle the epidemic, the largest human development crisis in history, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot said after meeting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The International Center for Technical Cooperation on AIDS will cost one million US dollar, half of which will be paid by UNAIDS, with the other half being covered by the Brazilian government. It will train personnel from 25 developing countries with which Brazil already has AIDS cooperation agreements, such as East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Cape Verde, Bolivia and Paraguay.
Brazils AIDS infection rate is far lower than its developing world peers at less than 1.0 percent of the population, according to government estimates. Many attribute that to the governments widespread AIDS prevention campaign and guarantee of free access to antiretroviral drug cocktails for people infected with HIV.
The program saves money in the long run by keeping people out of public hospitals. Brazil has also led a global movement to cut drug prices by pressuring drug manufacturers to offer big discounts to poor countries or have their products copied in domestic laboratories.
The World Bank estimated in the 1980s that the number of AIDS carriers in Brazil would reach 1,2 million in 2000, but the total has not surpassed 600.000 cases. Statistics supplied by the United Nations 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic have shown that among the 400.000 people around the world who have access to antiretroviral medicines, 140.000 live in Brazil.
In related news, The Panafrican News Agency reports that Brazilian authorities have reaffirmed their commitment to building a pharmaceutical plant in Mozambique to produce generic anti-retroviral drugs used in prolonging the lives of people suffering from AIDS in the southern African country.
Meanwhile, AIDS threatens to derail the International Conference on Population and Development strategy agreed upon a decade ago. Although billions of dollars are now pouring in to fight the disease, much of this money is going into AIDS-specific programs that do not address reproductive health more broadly.
Nafis Sadik, the UN secretary-generals special envoy for HIV in Asia, observes that, as reproductive health is engulfed in a storm of religious and political controversy, organizations concerned with fighting AIDS are failing to make use of valuable infrastructure and expertise already on the ground in places where the disease hits hardest.
The news comes as womens health experts said on Thursday the United States is endangering the lives of millions of women because of its policy of teaching that sexual abstinence is the best way to fight AIDS.
Delegates at a meeting in London to gauge progress since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development said policies backed by President George W. Bush had hurt their cause.
– As the US attacks the efficacy of condoms, as the US refuses to put its shoulder behind making sure that women have the ability to protect themselves, it is becoming responsible in effect for the deaths of tens of thousands, in fact of millions, of women, said Timothy Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and a former US senator.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
