AIDS CONFERENCE IN SOUTH AFRICAN CITY OF DURBAN BETWEEN JULY 18 AND 22 OF GREAT HELP TO MOST DELEGATES

(TWO OF THE SCORES OF JOURNALISTS FROM SOUTH AFRICA AND AROUND THE WORLD WHO COVERED THE 21 ST INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE. IN THE PICTURE ARE MAYA JAGJIVAN AND PRABASHINI MOODLEY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION(SABC)

The 21st International Aids Conference, held in the South African coastal city of Durban over the past five days, has provided a platform not only for policy makers, scientists, researchers, multi-national companies, and international personalities to highlight the tremendous work against HIV-AIDs, but it also was an opportunity for activist groups to highlight their concerns. But most importantly it provided an opportunity for thousands of delegates to learn and further equip themselves for anti-Aids programmes when they return to their home countries. The conference attracted more than 20 000 delegates from more than 180 countries around the world. Most of the delegates were from the worst-affected regions in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Nearly 20-million people in Africa are afflicted with the Aids virus, while South Africa has the highest number in the world with nearly seven-million affected. During the course of the conference, I inter-acted and spoke to a number of delegates from Africa and Asia to get a picture of the pandemic in their countries, the efforts being undertaken to overcome the pandemic and how the conference will help them in their programmes against the disease.

(Picture of Ms Funsho Olugbemi) Ms Funhso Olugbemi is a Development Policy Planner and Project Co-Ordinator on HIV for the Nigerian Government in the capital, Abuja. She said the situation of HIV-AIDs was serious in Nigeria with millions afflicted. The Government had many programmes to treat affected people but they had to do more to help all the afflicted people. She said their delegation was very keen on the new cost-effective HIV vaccine that had been developed and the combined treatment for TB and HIV. “We are interested”, she said, “in the new HIV vaccine that is being developed”. “We think it will go a long way to help to curb, to treat, and to prevent the HIV scourge. “We are also interested in the programmes and vaccines to treat the three major infectious – HIV, tuberculosis and HVC together. We believe his is also a new innovation that will be very good and it will go a long way towards the prevention of HIV,” said Ms Olugbemi. She also found that civil society groups in South Africa were very vocal and this was noticed when they held demonstrations at the conference. These groups promoted the cause of homosexuals, bi-sexuals, transgenders, and sex workers. “These groups work together with the Government to tackle the Aids pandemic. In Nigeria, we don’t have this co-operation. So when we go back we want to bring as much as possible the groups together. “You know when one side is doing one thing and the other is doing another, you will not really be able to achieve much. But if you can bring civil society together to work with the Government, the rate of achievement will be higher and we can move forward from there.”

(Picture of Ms Josephine Balati) Ms Josephine Balati, Director of Health Services and Co-ordinator of 900 health services for faith-based Social Services Commission in Tanzania, is another delegate who said the Aids Conference was of “tremendous benefit” to her and her fellow delegates. She said more than one million people in Tanzania were affected by the pandemic and currently there were more than 600 000 under AR treatment. They worked very closely with the Tanzanian Government in providing medical care and trying to stem the pandemic. She said the conference had provided them an opportunity to become aware of new vaccines and programmes to fight the disease. “We have learnt that there is still a lot of work to be done and we need to join hands in this campaign against the disease,” she said. “All stakeholders need to closely engage the communities in the fight against HIV-AIDs, recoginising the different groups in the communities, and the whole issue of human rights has to be respected so that everybody will be able to access services.” Ms Balati added: “What I am going to take back is the whole issue of rolling out Virolode testing services, combination of fighting TB and HIV-Aids, close engagement of the communities, and also to make sure that all the stake-holders work together to fight HIV-AIDs.”

(Picture of Namgay Tshering of Bhutan) The Director of Health Services in the tiny Kingdom of Bhutan in south Asia, Mr Namgay Tshering, is another delegate who found the 21st aids conference to be great help. He said they faced a rise in HIV-AIDs because of the proximity of his country to India, which has one of the highest number of affected people in the Asian region. He and his fellow delegates, he said, had benefited from the conference sessions on new vaccines and the interaction with fellow delegates. “The learnings that I will be taking back from this conference,” he said, “would be the findings from the abstract presentations on the elimination of mother-to-child transmission”. “In Bhutan we have noticed there is an increase in mother-to-child transmission of HIV virus and at the same time. We have also had the opportunity of interacting with colleagues from all the regions of the world,” said Mr Tshering.

(Picture of Bruce Guma) Mr Bruce Guma of Kampala, Uganda, is an aids activist and leader of the non-government organisation, Aids Rights Alliance. He said almost every community had been affected in Uganda. “While a lot has been achieved in providing education for the people and treatment for those affected, not everyone is being treated,” he said. As an activist, he wanted to see all the speeches and programmes announced at the conference being translated into reality. “We have the ambitious 90/90/90 campaign, and we have the vaccines that are being presented,” he said, “and we want these to actually being translated into addressing the pandemic. In most cases it does not translate into helping my grand-mother in the village who is actually living with HIV”. He would like to see resources being allocated in such way that all role players are involved and finally the affected people are assisted. “The person, the human being who is living with HIV, how we actually help the people living with aids and making sure that resources reach the people who need them and how do we involve them, ” said Mr Guma. The latest five-day Aids conference in Durban witnessed a wide variety of multi-national and other organisations providing new vaccines, medications and remedies for the cure and prevention of the pandemic.

(Picture of Ed King and another official, Robyn Murray) One of the lesser-known non-government organisations is “In Practice Africa”, which provides a comprehensive curriculum on anti-retroviral therapy, on TB, and nursing care for health professionals. Mr Ed King, Chief Information Officer of the organisation, said they had just released a book, written by South African clinicians for health care professionals in the continent. The book has been released on CD and the internet. “It caters for medical practitioners who treat millions of patients around the continent and other parts of the world,” he said. “We have been doing HIV education for health care professionals around the world now since the 1990s. It ‘s very rewarding as well as very worthwhile thing to be doing. You know HIV changes so often, there’s always new drugs, new strategies, new approaches, so there’s always a need by health care professionals for education that will keep them up to date to make sure that their patients receive the best possible care that’s available right now. Continuing education for HIV is a hugely important need internationally and as much so in Africa than anywhere else.” He said education for Health Care professionals really played an important role in fighting the disease. “Hundreds of thousands, millions of lives have been saved by the dissemination of anti-retroviral therapy in Africa and that is possible by education that helps health care professionals to know how to use these drugs and how to get the most out of them, how to save their patients lives, so they play a very important role,” he said. Mr King said the International Aids Conference played a very important role in providing an opportunity for scientists, experts, and medical professionals to share their research findings and for those research to be made known to the outside the world. “Conferences like the International Aids conference serve two or three key purposes. Firstly, they have a place for policy makers, researches, people involved in prevention and so on to come together and share what they have learnt in one place with people working in another. So they are very important in a way in which people working in the field can learn from each other, find out what works and what doesn’t and disseminate those best practices internationally,” said Mr King.

(Picture of Professor Jerry Coovadia) One of the senior HIV-AIDs research specialists in South Africa, Professor Jerry Coovadia, Director of the Maternal, Adolescent and Child Health (or MATCH), was the chairperson of the Aids Conference in 2000. During this week he was also involved and presented a paper on the state of affairs of the disease in the country. Professor Coovadia said South Africa had made enormous progress in curbing and providing treatment to affected people. For instance South Africa had the largest anti-retroviral programme in the world with more than three million people on ARV treatment. But, he said, it was going to take some time in completely eradicating the disease. “I think we have gone a long way,” he said. “I mean we have made enormous progress globally and in South Africa, so there’s no doubt about that and we will continue to make progress. “To really eradicate it is going to be a long job but it’s not impossible given the advances in medicine, given the advances in what we know about genes and how genes can affect it, given our advances in the best forms of treatment and very important too is prevention – circumcision prevents, condoms prevents, change in sexual behaviour, monogamy prevents and so on. So I think it is possible but it is going to take a long time.” Although more than a million people had succumbed to the HIV virus since the pandemic broke out in the 1980s, the death rate today had been drastically reduced because of the various treatment and prevention programmes that are being carried out. He was most impressed with the success they had achieved in bringing down the mother-to-child infection rate. “The transmission rate used to be from the late 1980s to the 1990s for every 100 HIV positive women about 30 to 32 of the babies were infected. The figure now is phenomenally low, it’s under two percent - two out of every 100 women. So for every 100 HIV positive women under two babies are infected, which is like almost eliminating the disease.” Professor Coovadia said the situation of the HIV-AIDs pandemic was still quite severe in South Africa. “It’s still quite severe. If you take it globally, we probably still have the worst epidemic rate. Not only is the country most seriously affected than anywhere else in the world, it so happens that KwaZulu-Natal is the most seriously affected province for very many reasons. Those are really historical reasons about employment, migration of workers in mines and so on and the dislocation of established families. “As I said we have the biggest epidemic in the world, it’s in excess of six million. But because of the reasonably good infrastructure we had, I think it has gone down now, in the public sector we have been able to win many battles against HIV-AIDs. The biggest battles is to keep down the numbers and keep down the deaths and we have succeeded quite substantially in that way.” Dr Fareed Abdulla, CEO of the SA National Aids Council, was another Aids expert who in a final message at the conference called for behavioural change in order to drastically curb the spread of the disease. He said active measures must be taken to bring down the pandemic among all affected people. Nearly 37-million were affected around the world but only 17-million were receiving HIV treatment. “We need to do much more on treatment and much more on prevention. We need to tackle behavioural change, inter-generational sex and all those things that will prevent the spread of the disease. Most important of all is to prevent our young women from becoming infected. Young women between the ages of 15 and 25 are the worst affected and this is one of the main findings to come out of the conference. “Two thousand young women are being infected in South Africa every week and that’s a massive problem. The world has recoginised this, the government has recoginised this. All the NGOs here have recoginised this and that’s got to be the biggest new message out of this conference.” – ends subrygovender/durban