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"Big shift in AIDS fight"
The
Star (www.thestar.com.my)
(16/08/06)
TORONTO: Researchers, activists and major funders have agreed to a shift in
the fight against AIDS to focus on prevention and especially helping women
protect themselves.
With big pharmaceutical companies making their HIV drugs available cheaply
to developing nations and with generic drugs available, speakers at the 16th
International Conference on AIDS agreed the focus should move to preventing
new infections.
“Prevention of HIV had slipped off the agenda and now is being pushed by
unexpected quarters,” Dr Peter Piot, head of the United Nations AIDS agency
UNAIDS, said in an interview.
That includes activists who had previously focused on getting lifesaving
drugs to infected people, he said.
Opening the conference in Toronto on Sunday, Microsoft founder Bill Gates,
who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to AIDS programmes, said he
would be seeking good prevention programmes that focused on women.
These will include the development of microbicides — gels or creams that can
prevent sexual transmission of the fatal and incurable virus.
More than half, or 17.3 million, of the 34 million adults infected with the
AIDS virus are women, according to the World Health Organisation.
With more than 4 million new infections a year and 2.8 million deaths, the
need for prevention is clear. But some political and religious leaders are
standing in the way of effective programmes, experts said.
Academy Award winning actor Richard Gere told an AIDS conference that the
media — from the chief executives of television networks to the cultural
icons of Hollywood and Bollywood — must fight the disease by using their
enormous reach into people's hearts and homes.
Gere, a longtime AIDS activist and founder and director of Healing the
Divide and the Heroes Project in India, joined media giants from India, the
Caribbean, South Africa and Russia on Monday to promote the concept of
planting AIDS awareness campaigns in television programming.
He said he was inspired by Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS in 1985, and
Hudson's good friend Elizabeth Taylor, one of the first stars to get heavily
involved in anti-AIDS campaigns.
Barbara Lee, a California Democrat in the US House of Representatives, said
the administration of President George W. Bush may have to be forced into
changing its policies that stress abstinence as the best prevention method.
She is sponsoring legislation that would eliminate US requirements that 33%
of all funds spent on prevention go to promoting
abstinence-only-until-marriage approaches. — Reuters
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