Kenyan
student tells Africa’s story at G8
By Harold Ayodo
Monday July 18, 2005
When bomb explosions hit the heart of London,
an orphaned Kenyan boy was briefing G8 first
ladies on the ravages of HIV/Aids in Africa.
The harsh HIV/Aids
realities on the ground shocked his listeners
who admitted that they only read, heard and
watched the dying in the media.
 |
|
Gordon Oyoo poses with Mr Meja Okeyo
of Plan International on arrival from
the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
Oyoo was addressing world leaders
when news of the London bombings was
received.
|
Gordon
Oyoo, 16 also had breakfast with British Lords
and MPs when he presented them with a list
of recommendations on how to reduce disease,
hunger, poverty and death in Africa.
Oyoo
attended the Children 8 (C8) summit — synonymous
to the G8 summit — in Scotland. The C8 and
G8 ran concurrently.
British
Prime Minister Tony Blair launched the Young
People’s Commission for Africa in February
2004 to identify issues affecting Africa and
possible solutions.
Plan
International, a non-governmental organisation,
sponsored the project and six schools were
selected to write projects on African issues.
Alliance
Boys, Alliance Girls, Kanyawanga, Kisii, Maseno
High schools and Starehe Boys’ Centre were
identified.
The
programme entailed writing the projects and
sending them to the United Kingdom via the
Internet for assessment.
Maseno
School emerged the best and the NGO urged
students to write projects on Africa’s problems.
Oyoo’s paper was the best.
The
NGO sponsored his flight and accommodation
at Gleneagles, Scotland, where he met Laura
Bush, Cherie Blair, Bernaddette Chirac, Mrs
Berlusconi and the wife of European Commission
President, Mrs Baroso.
He
says the first ladies were especially concerned
about HIV/Aids in Africa.
"We
were having an informal meeting where I told
them how many villages are deserted because
of the pandemic," Oyoo said.
Representing
African Youth on the hardships in the continent,
Oyoo told the meeting about the large number
of children who were out of school as a result
of Aids.
"They
were moved when I related how children had
been orphaned and could not go to school as
even their elder relatives are dead," he said.
Laura
Bush and Cherie Blair, he said, were amazed
that children below 10 have dropped out of
school to attend to ailing parents on their
deathbeds.
He
told the First Ladies that over 12.5 million
children in Africa are orphaned.
The
Form Three student’s listeners were all ears
at Gleneagles when they received news of the
London bombings. "They were informed of the
terror attacks but turned back to me with
questions," he said.
They
asked him whether antiretrovirals were available
in the country.
"They
could not believe that the disease still takes
its toll yet ARVs are available. I told them
about the reality," he said.
Oyoo,
a needy student whose school fees is paid
by the Constituency Development Fund, took
breakfast with British leaders at the House
of Lords.
At
the House of Lords, the young African ambassador
presented his host with a list of African
issues.
Oyoo
told the House of Lords that African countries
should be assisted in manufacturing the drugs,"
he said.
He
told the Lords and British MPs that spending
on HIV/Aids should be monitored for the needy
to gain access.
Oyoo,
who was representing Africa with Chikondi
Chiwera, a Malawian girl, also presented the
list of recommendations to Scotland’s first
minister, Jack Mac’Connell.
In
his two-week stay in Gleneagles, Oyoo was
interviewed by BBC Radio and Radio France.
"I
was also interviewed by the Daily Telegraph
journalists and other international writers,"
he said.
Top
Give women a
chance against AIDS
July
18, 2005
Investment
in microbicides could help in the HIV epidemic in Africa,
writes Ilene Wong.
In
my nightmares, I see the women we have failed to protect
from AIDS.
Women
in South Africa do almost everything. When they cook, they
harvest spinach, carrots and cabbage from vegetable gardens
they have planted themselves. When they clean, they use
brooms made from dried grass they walked kilometres to harvest.
They wash their family's laundry by hand, wringing out clothes
heavy with soapy water with hands that could break the neck
of a chicken in one twist.
The
one thing women don't do in South Africa, however, is tell
their husbands to use condoms. When I taught AIDS awareness
in a rural area near Mozambique, even virgin schoolboys
posited that prophylactics were passe. "You can't eat a
sweet in the wrapper," they would say shyly in their broken
English.
In
many cultures, men give "bride prices" and tacitly expect
a maid, a cook and a sexual servant. Women who request condoms
are invariably considered suspect. Yet in Zimbabwe 60 per
cent of women who have AIDS report being married and monogamous.
Young
women around the world need a prevention tool they can control,
and since the late 1990s some discerning researchers have
explored one possibility: an effective microbicide - that
is, a drug that women can apply directly to their vaginas
to reduce the spread of HIV. Antiretroviral drugs can hold
back the tide of AIDS once a person is infected, but they're
costly and not a true cure. HIV vaccines are years, possibly
decades, away from widespread distribution. Which brings
us back to prevention.
The
"ABCs" of prevention are abstinence, being faithful and
condom use. But we've seen women slip through the cracks
with these methods. Microbicides would be a life-saving
safety net and could even theoretically prevent HIV transmission
after rape if applied daily. Yet very few people - indeed,
very few health professionals - know what they are. Why?
In
a world where vaccines are the rock stars of HIV prevention,
microbicides are the street musicians - egalitarian, resourceful
and poorly paid. The International Partnership for Microbicides
estimates an annual $US280 million ($370 million) investment
for the next five years could generate an effective microbicide
by 2010.
Yet
microbicide researchers, typically non-profit organisations
and academics, are struggling on $US100 million a year.
Certainly the microbicide world has suffered losses in momentum
from products that have failed to fulfil their promise.
Additionally, potential microbicides are embarrassingly
low-tech, with one formulation being derived from seaweed
and one from lime juice.
But
one gets the impression that pharmaceutical companies would
be more persistent in their efforts if the main beneficiaries
of microbicides were not impoverished African women - women
such as Joan, who became infected when she was raped at
16 by an assailant with AIDS. She's one of the lucky ones,
enrolled in a clinical trial of antiretrovirals in Johannesburg.
But what if she, and the 50,000 yearly rape victims in South
Africa, had access to a microbicide they could put on before
leaving the house?
As
the US funnels more AIDS funding to faith-based organisations,
I despair for my sisters in Africa. A truly comprehensive
and far-sighted global AIDS program would recognise that
women need their own weapons against HIV. They need microbicides.
Ilene
Wong, a physician at Stanford University Hospital has done
AIDS work in Africa.
The
Washington Post
Top
Drugmakers
struggle with AIDS drugs
New treatments due but with many infected in poor countries
profits are slim; firms doing enough?
July 6, 2005: 4:48 PM EDT
By Aaron Smith, CNN/Money staff writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - With nearly 40 million people with AIDS
worldwide, why aren't drug companies pouring everything they have
into a cure for what some health workers call "the disease
of mass destruction?"
"It's not a commercially attractive market," said Barbara
Ryan, who follows the industry for Deutsche Bank North America.
"The prices [of AIDS drugs] get negotiated down by governments
around the world."
The
United Nations estimated there were 39.4 million people in 2004
living with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.
The UN says that 4.9 million people became infected in 2004 and
3.1 million died, the highest annual tally of fatalities since
the first case was diagnosed in 1981.
"Most of the infected people are in Third World countries
who can't afford and don't have access to these drugs," said
Andrew McDonald, analyst for ThinkEquity Partners.
According
to the U.N., 25.4 million AIDS patients, or 64 percent of the
world's total, live in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty is widespread.
"You've
got to give product away in Africa," said Ryan, the Deutsche
Bank analyst. "There's a natural arbitrage where the prices
get pressure around the world."
Geoff
Porges, an analyst at the Wall Street research firm Bernstein,
said total sales of AIDS drugs worldwide are about $3.5 billion
to $4 billion.
Those
revenues are divided among the 27 drugs identified by the Food
and Drug Administration as AIDS therapies, made by nine different
companies.
That
compares with annual sales of $4 billion or more for much more
profitable drugs that treat high cholesterol, high blood pressure
and schizophrenia, among others.
Nonetheless,
there are profits to be made on AIDS treatments, especially since
marketing costs are low and governments collaborate with private
companies on research.
GlaxoSmithKline
is the industry leader with eight AIDS drugs on the market. Glaxo
(down $0.02 to $48.03, Research) was the first drugmaker to develop
an AIDS drug, Retrovir, which has been available since 1987. Bristol-Myers
Squibb (down $0.39 to $24.88, Research) is a close competitor
with five products on the market.
Glaxo's
Combivir, a two-drug AIDS treatment, had more than $1 billion
in 2004 sales.
But
most of that came from the United States and Europe, where the
UN estimates the number of AIDS patients at 1.6 million, about
5 percent of the world total. According to Glaxo, Combivir sales
were $512 million in the U.S., $414 million in Europe, and $119
million everywhere else.
"It
is not one of the most profitable areas financially but it has
certainly been a valuable area of research if you look at what
we've been able to do with the disease, going from what used to
be a killer disease in the 1980s to what, in the developed world,
would be a chronic disease," said Glaxo spokeswoman Mary
Anne Rhyne.
"But
we've got a long way to go in the developing world."
Rhyne
said that "corporate responsibility" and "good
public relations" are incentives in developing and marketing
AIDS drugs.
"I
think we have a corporate responsibility to try and make our medicines
available," said Rhyne. "But to stay in business we
can't give it away and we can't sell at a loss. We have to sell
medicines at a sustainable price."
More
AIDS drugs could help drugmakers repair the industry's tarnished
image.
Merck,
one of the biggest drugmakers with $22.9 billion in sales last
year, faces more than 2,300 lawsuits after withdrawing its arthritis
painkiller Vioxx from the market last year because of health risks.
As a result, Merck stock has tumbled by more than a third over
the last year. But the company is considered the market leader
for researching a potential AIDS vaccine.
Earlier
this year, Merck began phase 2 testing for an AIDS vaccine in
conjunction with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, a non-profit
organization. Merck's product is designed to inject synthetic
HIV cells into the body, stimulating the production of cells that
kill the real HIV. While dozens of other vaccines are in testing,
Merck's product is in the most advanced stages of clinical trials.
The
importance of an AIDS vaccine cannot be overstated. Since a vaccine
would be used as a preventative, the target population is vast.
But most of the new cases are in the poorest countries. The UN
estimates 13,000 new AIDS cases every day, 95 percent of them
in the developing world.
Much
of the research for a potential vaccine is funded in part by the
federal government's National Institutes of Health. The NIH added
$100 million to its 2005 budget for AIDS vaccine research, to
$607 million, even though its overall budget for AIDS research
increased by only $12 million, to $2.9 billion. The NIH slashed
funding in other areas of AIDS research to bolster its vaccine
program.
Wayne
Koff, senior vice president of research for the International
AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said that researching a potential vaccine
is like "chasing a moving target" because of the virus'
tendency to mutate. But Koff, whose organization funds vaccine
research, said the possibility of developing a successful vaccine
holds huge implications in fighting the disease.
"A
vaccine is the best hope to end the epidemic," said Koff.
Top
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