20/10/2005

Guebuza Opens Antiretroviral Training Course

Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Thursday called for a unity of efforts and resources to step up prevention and treatment of AIDS, and mitigation of the effects of the epidemic, not only in Mozambique, but across the continent.

He was speaking in the southern city of Matola at the opening of the seventh Pan-African training course on the DREAM (Drug Resource Enhancement against Aids and Malnutrition) programme, organised by the Italian NGO, the Sant'Egidio Community.

In addition to Mozambicans, medical staff from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are attending the course.

The Sant'Egidio Community is one of the NGOs cooperating with the Mozambican Health Ministry in administering antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients, and its DREAM programme claims a very high success rate - success in terms of keeping AIDS sufferers alive and leading normal lives.

"One of the decisive challenges in this struggle is training because the lack of qualified human resources is sometimes an insuperable obstacle", said Guebuza. "The fact that the Sant'Egidio Community has chosen Mozambique to serve as a model for implementing this programme in Africa demands a lot of commitment from us".

The introduction of antiretroviral therapy in Mozambique, the President continued, had revived hope among people who had previously believed they were under a death sentence. Currently the availability of this therapy, he argued, plays a key role in mobilising society for the battle against AIDS.

Guebuza said that prevention campaigns had now shown their limitations. It seemed that information and education of communities, unless properly combined with cultural factors, was not producing the desired results.

The DREAM programme is now providing antiretroviral treatment to over 4,000 Mozambicans in 12 centres across the country, according to the DREAM coordinator in Mozambique, Paola Germano. (This is about 27 per cent of all Mozambicans on antiretrovirals).

After three years of implementation in Mozambique, DREAM has served as a model for the treatment of AIDS patients in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Guinea-Conakry, and is likely to be adopted in several other African countries.