Abstract

Time's Up

The article assesses the worldwide AIDS situation in 2004, compared to four years ago when the International AIDS Conference met in South Africa to initiate a global assault on HIV. Then, the idea of treating the millions of HIV-infected people worldwide was considered farfetched: US officials still insisted in 2001 that Africa's healthcare infrastructure was too primitive to support the prescription of HIV therapies and, more despicably, that Africans couldn't take these medicines successfully because they couldn't tell time. The official policy of wealthy nations was to focus on prevention and leave the millions already infected to die. But by the time some 19,000 AIDS researchers, government leaders, UN officials and AIDS advocates gathered in Bangkok in July of 2004, the winds had so shifted that the official conference theme was "Access for All." The question was no longer whether to treat but how. In the intervening years, studies in Uganda and South Africa proved that poor Africans with HIV are as consistent at popping pills as their middle-class counterparts in San Francisco. The World Bank, Kofi Annan and U.S. President George W. Bush all launched AIDS initiatives emphasizing treatment. However, Bush's plan was rejected. If a donor as significant as the United States continues its refusal to fund generic drugs, the plan to treat those with HIV will fail, and their health will soon fail too. The American go-it-alone war on Iraq has cost at least 11,000 lives so far. But its go-it-alone strategy on AIDS could cost far more. Bush's plan must be gutted and rebuilt before more time is lost.