07/02/2005

Pan-African Aids Training Course Begins

Prevention can no longer be the sole response in Africa to the AIDS epidemic - for if it is, then millions of people already infected with the HIV virus are condemned to death, declared Paola Germano, an Italian doctor working with the Italian NGO, the Sant'Egidio Community, in Maputo on Monday.

Germano is the coordinator of the Sant'Egidio anti-AIDS programme that began in 2002, and is known by the English acronym DREAM (Drug Resource Enhancement against AIDS and Malnutrition).

DREAM claims a spectacular success rate, with 95 per cent of its patients, treated with anti-retroviral drugs, still alive.

Germano was speaking at the opening of the 5th Pan-African DREAM Training Course on anti-retroviral therapy. Four out of the five courses have been held in Maputo. Participants came from across the continent, including Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon, Nigeria and Guinea-Bissau, "Today, therapy is possible", stressed Germano. "In the west, the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs as from 1996 has not only allowed thousands of patients to survive, but has also allowed a quality of life no different from that observed in many other chronic conditions. In Africa, however, access to the therapy has run into many serious obstacles".

"One of the paradoxes of our societies is that they possess effective treatments, but do not make them available to those who need them", she added.

Germano argued that in Africa "AIDS multiplies poverty. It particularly decimates people in the productive age groups. The deaths of professional and technical cadres is one of the most desperate aspects of the problem, since there are so few of them".

AIDS also weakened still further health systems that were already fragile, and in some countries AIDS patients are now occupying some 60 per cent of hospital beds.

The Sant'Egidio intervention, making treatment with generic anti-retroviral drugs available for African patients free of charge, "is an attempt at justice, bridging, at least in part, the inequalities between north and south".

Germano accepted that a programme against AIDS cannot be limited to the provision of drugs. "It needs an overall approach", she said. "That is the DREAM approach - prevention, health education, diagnosis, treatment, nutritional support, home care, social support, and the training of health staff".

Dr Mouzinho Saide, head of the Health Ministry's AIDS programme, told the gathering that the current estimate of HIV infection in Mozambique is that 14.9 per cent of people aged between 15 and 49 are HIV-positive - which means that about 1.5 million Mozambicans are carrying the virus.

He said that by now, about 8,000 Mozambicans are receiving anti-retroviral therapy, a number which the Ministry hopes to raise to 132,000 by 2008. As for mother-to-child transmission of the virus, anti-retroviral drugs were shown to disrupt this - to date 5,000 healthy, uninfected babies have been born to HIV- positive mothers.

In delivering anti-retroviral treatment, the Health Ministry is currently working with three foreign partners - Sant'Egidio, the US-based Health Alliance International and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) of Switzerland and Luxemburg.