African Countries Urged to Take More Care of People with HIV/AIDS

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, July 11, 2003

African Countries Urged to Take More Care of People with HIV/AIDS

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Participants at a workshop for health professionals working with national HIV/AIDS programs have called on African governments to scale up access to care and treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS to reduce the impact of the pandemic on their economies.

Dan Makuto, World Health Organization (WHO) senior adviser to the executive director of Family and Community Health in Geneva, said in Harare on Thursday that only 1 percent of Africans in need of anti-retroviral treatment have access to it compared to 85 percentin the developed countries and 5 percent in parts of the developing world.

"We must scale up access to anti-retroviral viral (ARV) treatment in order to close the huge and unacceptable gap between access and need," Makuto told participants to a four-day workshop for health professionals working with national HIV/AIDS programs, non-governmental organizations and policymakers from 17 Eastern and Southern African countries which ended in Harare on Thursday.

Speaking at the same workshop, Steven Shongwe, the secretary ofthe Commonwealth Regional Health Community Secretariat for East, Central and Southern Africa, said that scaling up access to ARV therapies required political will, visionary political and professional leadership, careful planning and mobilization of resources and the adaptation and utilization of the WHO and UNAIDSguidelines.

He described HIV/AIDS as an emergency, especially in Eastern and Southern Africa, which has the highest burden of the pandemic in the world.

"Increased access to ARV therapy will help remove stigmatization and discrimination as more people will share their experience and be motivated to know their HIV status, thus bringing hope instead of despair," he said.

He said although Africa only had 10 percent of the world's population, the region accounted for about 30 million or 70 percent of the 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

According to WHO estimates, at least 3.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa were children under 15 years of age.

Antoine Kabore, the director of the Division of Communicable Disease Prevention and Control at the WHO Regional Office for Africa (AFRO-WHO), said that apart from reducing HIV/AIDS-related deaths, improved access to care and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS would contribute to forestalling the collapse of theeducational and health systems through the loss of human capital.

It would also reduce hospitalization costs, improve investment in health care, reduce the cost of caring for orphans, stabilize productivity through the retention of workers, improved food security and avert immense general social dysfunction.

He called on workshop participants to develop a clear road map for scaling up and implementing care and treatment services at country level.

The workshop is expected to come up with a status report on care and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS in the 17 participating countries, develop a framework for scaling up and implementing access to quality care and treatment and elaborate a framework for strengthening partnership in the provision of technical and financial support to the countries.

The 17 participating countries include Angola, Botswana, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It was reported that more than 2,500 people die each week in Zimbabwe from AIDS related illnesses.

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