The Nation Newspaper

Tag: AIDS

  • FCT records drop in HIV/AIDS prevalence

    The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) has recorded a 10 per cent drop in HIV/AIDS prevalence in the last two years, the FCT HIV/AIDS Programme Coordinator, Dr Yakubu Mohammed has said. The figure was 8.6 percent in 2010 and 7.5 in 2012.

    He said the programme may not have achieved peak performance over the period in terms of intervention on HIV/AIDS in the territory, it has made tremendous progress compared to two years ago. FCT is one of the high risk HIV burden areas in the country as identified by the National HIV Control programme.

    According the Coordinator, who made the disclosure while fielding questions from newsmen during a one-day FCT HIV/AIDS Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on Acceleration of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) Scale- Up in Abuja over the weekend, the reduction is due to a paradigm shift in addressing the challenge of the scourge by the FCT health sector response strategies.

    “What this means is that the prevalence is reducing; and we are committed to sustaining the success recorded so far, as what we want is that by the end of 2015, the HIV/AIDS prevalence in the FCT to be less than five percent

    “With the support of other key stakeholders in the fight against the scourge, we will come out with a blue print that will drive the process for the attainment of our target, for prevention of new cases of HIV/AIDS in the FCT.

    “We have made tremendous progress; and we are still making progress; and although we can’t really say that we have reached where we are expected to be, but we know that our performance has increased, and is still increasing over the period”, he said.

    Earlier in her remark, the Director, Public Health, Health and Human Services Secretariat (HHSS) of the FCTA, Dr Folasade Momoh, noted that given the peculiar HIV/AIDS epidemic profile of the nation characterised by high prevalence rate, high MTCT burden, low PMTCT and ART coverage, low retention rate of persons living with HIV, what is required is strong commitment, efficiency and accountability by all stakeholders, in order to accelerate the attainment of various Universal Access (UA) targets for the elimination of various PMTCT by 2015.

    According to her, the HIV/AIDS epidemic situation in Nigeria still remains a major public health challenge of high magnitude, in spite of enormous resources government is committing to combat it at the national, state, and local government levels.

    She therefore urged all stakeholders collaborating with the secretariat to embrace its initiatives and vigorously pursue the course, in order to contribute towards the realisation of the set objectives; “and in turn reinforce our policy trust and facilitate our ownership and sustainability drive in FCT.”

  • Senate public hearing on HIV/AIDS discrimination

    Senate public hearing on HIV/AIDS discrimination

  • FG develop new blueprint to eradicate HIV/AIDS

    FG develop new blueprint to eradicate HIV/AIDS

    President Goodluck Jonathan on Monday said that the Government is working on a new blueprint for the eradication of HIV/AIDS in the country.

    He was speaking to Dr. Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the United Nations’ Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, at State House, Abuja.

    He said: ‘I have instructed the National Action Committee on AIDS, NACA, to produce a new blueprint for the eradication of AIDS, with necessary milestones, clearly defined responsibilities of all stakeholders and expected results.’

    A multi-faceted approach to eradicate malaria in the country, he said, was also receiving attention of the government.

    Stressing that Nigeria appreciated the huge investments by the international community, especially the G-8 nations in the fight against these diseases, he said that the country is totally committed to doing right things in the health sector.

    Adding that Nigeria was ready to continue collaboration with the Global Fund, he said that he was committed to eradicating polio from Nigeria by 2015.

    As he welcomed the invitation to be a Co-Chair, representing Africa, in the next replenishment cycle of the Global Fund, he said that it was ‘an honour’ to Nigeria.

    Other Co-Chairs included the UN Secretary General, one leader each from the G-8, the BRICS nations and the private sector.

    Speaking at the occasion, Dr. Mark Dybul, said that the Global Fund was interested in strengthening the partnership with Nigeria in order to further develop the health care sector in the country.

    He expressed appreciation for the leadership of President Jonathan for the health sector, and his support for the activities of the Global Fund in Nigeria.

    The Global Fund Executive Director was accompanied to the State House by Dr. Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, Chairman of Friends of Africa.

  • People living with AIDS seek national attention

    For how long would Nigeria continue to depend on foreign countries and international donors to fund HIV and AIDS treatment?

    This is the question on the lips on People Living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA).

    The trend of waiting for a donor before something meaningful can be done, they said, was dangerous as donors can withdraw their funds and Nigeria will be worse for it.

    They enjoined the Federal Government to have a national response to address the problem of HIV and AIDS in the country.

    Reacting to the development, Health Minister, Prof Onyebuchi Chukwu, said the country is not lacking in national response to the disease.

    He said the country has never depended on donors to tackle the issue of HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment as it has programmes funded by the country to prevent the disease.

    “Nigeria is not a donor dependent country. Less than 10 per cent of health care funding is from donor agencies,” he added.

    He said the country by virtue of its membership of the United Nations should be getting donations from the body’s agencies, stressing that it has never failed in its obligation as a member country to pay its dues, which is a prerequisite to getting donations.

    Chukwu said HIV and AIDS is an emotional problem but not the biggest killer of people, stressing that there are other problems that needed more attention.

    They wanted the country to take ownership of HIV and AIDS funding so that when donor groups and foreign countries pull out from supporting the country, it would be able to manage its problem without having to go cap in hand begging for support.

    Executive Director, Positive Action for Treatment Access (PATA), Mrs Rolake Odetoyinbo, said Nigeria needs to have more local ownership by investing in the management and treatment of the disease.

    She stressed that most of the treatment is funded by the international partners, which is risky.

    Mrs Odetoyinbo said: “There is a need for the Federal Government to make commitment to the course financially. If the donors withdraw their funding we will be in trouble.

  • AIDS researchers ponder reported cure

    AIDS researchers ponder reported cure

    AIDS researchers, advocacy organisations and global health officials spent Monday trying to determine whether the report that a baby girl born in Mississippi was cured of the infection is a therapeutic breakthrough or a scientific curiosity.

    Even if the report proves true, aggressive HIV treatment starting at birth has no obvious relevance to adults, who are by far the biggest age group infected each year, a Washington Post reported said. Even in newborns it may be of little practical use, as nearly all mother-to-child infections can be prevented by a simpler strategy that is not yet fully implemented around the world.

    At the same time, news of a cured patient — the girl, now two and a half, would be only the second on record — has caught the world’s eye. Scientists are confident that even if the case isn’t a signpost to the future, it is of great importance right now.

    “Just like the first case [of a cure], it is generating a tremendous amount of attention and more importantly a tremendous number of testable hypotheses,” said Steven Deeks, an AIDS researcher at the University of California at San Francisco and a leader of the effort to reinvigorate the search for an AIDS cure.

    “I think if that is confirmed, it is one of the greatest pieces of news we can have,” said Michel Sidibé, director of UNAIDS. “It can bring us one step closer to the AIDS-free generation.”

    Sidibé, who spoke from Botswana, said UNAIDS will soon convene a meeting of researchers and global health officials to discuss how and where to test the Mississippi strategy. The most likely sites are in sub-Saharan Africa, where 91 per cent of mother-to-child infections occur.

    “More studies need to be done to understand the outcome,” he said.

    UNAIDS’s deputy director for science, Luiz Loures, said designing a clinical trial to test the Mississippi strategy “is not a major challenge.” Implementing it on a large scale is another matter. That would require laboratory equipment that detects the virus, which is not available in many rural settings in the developing world.

    About 330,000 babies become infected with HIV each year, either in the womb, during delivery, or through breast-feeding. That number has fallen steadily in recent years as countries have implemented a prevention strategy that can cut the mother-to-child rate of transmission from 30 percent to 1 percent. The Mississippi case, described at a scientific meeting in Atlanta, suggests a tool that could reduce the number further.

     

  • Aids deaths and the pharmaceutical industry

    Aids deaths and the pharmaceutical industry

    Several years ago, I began to learn about what I would come to regard as one of the great crimes in human history, whereby millions of people in Africa and elsewhere were cynically allowed to die of AIDS, while western governments and pharmaceutical companies blocked access to available low-cost medication. The outrage I felt as I discovered the details of this story was exceeded only by a deep sense of betrayal mixed with shame for not having known more about it in the first place.

    Today, I find those feelings mirrored in audiences who see my film, Fire in the Blood, which, incredibly, is the first comprehensive account of this horrendous atrocity and how it was eventually halted. As anyone who knows anything about pharmaceuticals will tell you, the name of the game is monopoly. In the case of medicine, monopolies emanate from patents. Typically a patent lasts for 20 years, but drug companies are expert at getting them extended. As long as the monopoly is in place, the company selling the drug can essentially charge whatever they want for it. Pricing is unrelated either to the cost of production (normally a few pennies per pill) or how much was spent in development, but a simple calculation of how to maximise revenue. Though most western countries do have price controls, these typically only keep price levels consistent with other comparable countries, so restraints are minimal.

    Why does society accept this? The narrative the industry has been immensely successful in selling is that it spends vast sums of money on research and development, that this R&D is very high risk, and that monopolies and high prices are a “necessary evil” needed to finance innovation of new medicines. These arguments do not hold up under scrutiny. 84% of worldwide funding for drug discovery research comes from government and public sources, against just 12% from pharma companies, which on average spend 19 times more on marketing than they do on basic research (paywalled link). When we screened our film at the Sundance festival last month, audiences were dismayed to learn how much of their tax money goes to discover medicines which are then sold back to them at monopoly prices nearly half of all Americans surveyed say they have trouble affording.

    In developing countries, where people typically pay for medicines out of pocket, the situation is far worse. Pharmaceutical company representatives have told me that in (relatively prosperous) South Africa, they price their products for the top 5% of the market, while in India their customer base might be just the top 1.5%. The rest of the population is of no interest. At the same time, drug companies are working tooth-and-nail to cut off supplies of lower-cost generic drugs originating in countries such as India, Brazil and Thailand, to make sure that they don’t miss out on a single customer who could possibly pay their sky-high prices.

    At the industry’s behest, governments in the US and Europe use a dizzying variety of trade mechanisms, threats of sanctions and so on to curtail supplies of affordable medicine in the global south. The potential impact of these measures in human terms is nothing less than cataclysmic. As Peter Mugyenyi, director of Africa’s largest AIDS treatment centre, says: “We are on standby awaiting another bloodbath.”

    To any suggestion that the prevailing system of monopolies on medicine is hugely inefficient, immoral and unsustainable, industry apologists contend that “it’s tried and tested”, whereas any proposed alternative would represent a massive gamble. This, again, is totally disingenuous. A vital first step is to raise the bar for granting patents: 90% of drug patents have no meaningful clinical advantages for patients, but nonetheless impede access.

    More significantly, for 70 years Canada had a system prohibiting monopolies on medicine, where patent holders received a statutory royalty on sales of generic equivalents. This maintained profit incentives for innovation, while ensuring the public was not held to ransom by monopoly pricing (it did not, however, produce the windfall profits to which the industry is addicted – so US trade negotiators had it killed under Nafta).

    As unthinkable as it may seem, the horror that saw millions of people die unnecessarily of HIV and AIDS while being denied safe and effective generic medicines produced at a fraction of the prices brand-name companies were charging, could be a mere taste of things to come.

     

  • HIV-AIDS alarm

    HIV-AIDS alarm

    • That one million Nigerians living with HIV cannot access drugs should worry everyone

    That 1.5 million Nigerians are medically certified to live with HIV and about one million of this number (two-thirds) do not have access to anti-retroviral drugs, should worry the Goodluck Jonathan presidency. It should worry it enough to crank up its HIV-AIDS policy.

    Prof. John Idoko, director-general of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), made this disclosure in his 2012 Pre-World AIDS Day media briefing.

    The NACA chief said though Nigeria in the past three years had received US $151.6 million under Phase 1 of the Global Fund HIV grant and another US $228 million from the Global Fund Phase 2, for 2013-2015, the result is still a two-third shortfall in the drug need of the patients infected. Aside, from the Global Fund, the Department of International Aid (BFID) of the British government has also made available a grant of N40 million to facilitate the National Call Centre for HIV, beside a four-year World Bank credit of US $225 million, approved for Nigeria in 2011.

    The sheer prognosis of this dire situation is that a good number of the affected could develop AIDS (acquired immune-deficiency syndrome, which knocks out the body’s disease-defence system) and, as a result, die avoidable deaths – avoidable deaths because HIV need not lead to AIDS, if well managed. People living with HIV, all over the world, have been known to live normal lives, so long as they keep to good nutrition; and the strict regimen of the prescribed antiretroviral drugs.

    Without access to the drugs, therefore, the Nigerian HIV-AIDS community would appear doomed. That would be a developmental disaster that should not even be contemplated.

    Despite the drug access shortfall, however, it has not been total bad news. According to the NACA chief, HIV testing facilities are increasing in the country, with a target of testing the HIV status of 20 million to 24 million Nigerians yearly. But even if patients’ HIV-AIDS status is known, what is the good if there is not enough access to drugs?

    From the high points of the Olusegun Obasanjo years, when anti-HIV-AIDS campaign received the highest presidential attention, the campaign appears to be flagging. That presidential activism on HIV-AIDS cleared the initial misconception that HIV was an automatic death sentence. It also changed the even greater misconception that it was a personal health crisis, instead of a mass developmental problem that it is.

    This it did through mass enlightenment, which not only tackled the taboo surrounding the HIV infection, but also attacked the stigma and discrimination that made family members and communities of those living with HIV to shun them out of fear and loathing, so much so that quite a good number of citizens living with HIV were encouraged to go open on their status, and receive treatment to manage their health.

    Unfortunately however, things are flagging. The question is why? Is it campaign fatigue? Or corruption as many have alleged, for in truth, some HIV-AIDS non-governmental organisations have been accused of misappropriating donor funds?

    Whatever it is, an urgent presidential intervention is called for – and President Jonathan must rise to the occasion. But that does not necessarily entail throwing money at the problem. NACA must be further primed to push out more anti-HIV/AIDS enlightenment to put the campaign back to the front burner; and effective measures must be put in place to plug loopholes and checkmate corruption.

    It is absolutely unacceptable that two-thirds of Nigeria’s HIV-AIDS population have no access to antiretroviral drugs. That is tantamount to bating an avoidable developmental disaster.

     

  • Nigeria, Ghana, others get waste management manual

    To reduce the incidence of HIV and AIDS among other infections and environmental pollution, Nigeria and four other member-countries of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) now have a manual on effective management of health care waste.

    A don at the Niger Delta University, Bayelsa State, Prof Mynepalli Sridhar, said poorly managed health care waste had been exposing medical staff and people to pollution and infections.

    According to him, improper waste disposal has negative effect, not only on medical staff, but also on the society at large.

    Sridhar spoke at a workshop on Abidjan-Lagos Corridor’s (ALCO’s) Simplified manual for health care waste management in Lagos.

    He said the sub-region now has a practical and explicit document which clearly provides legal, administrative and financial guidelines on a daily basis for a rational and responsible management of health care waste.

    “This manual, harmonised and ratified by member countries, among other things, contains basic information about the nature, generation, collection, storage, transportation, treatment and disposal of health care waste,” he added.

    He said its implementation at the regional level will ensure a culture of best practices in health facilities and borders, adding that it will also reduce or minimise the incidence of infection of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV and AIDS along the Abidjan-Lagos corridor.

    He said ALCO’s mandate was HIV and AIDS prevention, care and support, treatment and the facilitation of free movement of people and goods along the road linking Abidjan to Lagos.

    “ Its intervention covers five ECOWAS countries. They are Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria,” he added.

    He said the agreement was signed by the Minister of Health of the countries.

    Sridhar said it was clear that the management of health care waste in the sub-region often face many problems such as ignorant among stakeholders, limited capacity for management of health care waste, absence of legal framework and lack of a discernable plan for HCWM along the Abidjan-Lagos Transport Corridor.

    Environment and Medical Waste Management, Specialist, Jules Kouassi said the development of the manual was ratified by the five-member countries in July 2006 in Accra, Ghana.

    The manual, he added, was initiated and developed by ALCO to serve as a practical tool in the hands of stakeholders along the corridor, to ensure effective management of health care waste.