In September, protesters gathered in Washington, DC to demand the elimination of debt for poor countries to allow them to save their resources to fight AIDS. In August, naked ACTUP demonstrators raised the call at the Republican National Convention. The call for debt relief to fight AIDS has been an important demand of the anti-AIDS community for several years. It is time the world takes this step.

Debt servicing for dozens of poor countries drains tens of billions of dollars each year that could be used to provide treatment and preventative tools to fight HIV/AIDS. African countries alone paid about $15 billion in debt servicing in 2003. The failure of the Bush administration to adequately provide financial and material aid to fight this disease means that the international community will have to take the lead.

An important measure in this fight is 100 percent debt cancellation for countries struggling to provide medicines, education and preventative tools such as condoms to their populations but are caught in debt bondage to international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

In the international struggle to fight HIV/AIDS Bush has been AWOL. The amount the US will contribute, if Bush’s proposals are allowed to stand, to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS will shrink by 64 percent in 2005, prompting some anti-AIDS activists to predict the fund’s impending bankruptcy. Bush’s January 2003 $15 billion promise, says Paul Davis of Health GAP, is far short of what is needed. '[H]is five-year plan to treat 2 million people,' insists Davis, 'means that 13 to 15 million people with AIDS will die during that same time period.'

Health GAP argues that the US needs to chip in about $30 billion over the same period to fight the disease adequately. The Kerry-Edwards campaign has pledged to provide this amount.

According to Global AIDS Alliance, the administration says it is providing AIDS treatment to 25,000 people through its own programs as well as its contributions to other AIDS programs. This figure represents 1.25 percent of the goal the Bush pledged in January 2003, which was to deliver treatment to 2 million people by 2008.

The Bush plan is using expensive, brand name drugs, rather than keeping its promise to use the lowest cost drugs available. Bush’s promised 'expedited' approval process has yet to review a single generic drug for use in the US program. In fact, the administration’s approval process slows down access to generic AIDS drugs, say activists.

'It’s disappointing that a year and a half after declaring AIDS a global emergency, we are still just 1.25 percent towards the treatment goal that had been announced,' says Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of Global AIDS Alliance. 'If the administration had not rejected emergency funding of its initiative last year we would certainly be further along.' Congress, in its AIDS authorization bill passed last year, set a goal of 500,000 people on treatment by September 30. The administration’s performance represents five percent of that figure.

Bush has also taken steps to curtail competition from low-cost generic medications, even though they are successfully used around the world. Pressure by the administration has already forced agreements with many Latin American countries, as well as Morocco and Singapore, to block generics. Thailand, an innovator in the production of AIDS medication, is now under severe pressure to follow suit.

According to Jim Lobe, of Foreign Policy in Focus, Bush’s struggle over unilateral control of the global AIDS policy costs the lives of 8,000 people a day. According to UN estimates, 25 million of the 38 million infected with HIV worldwide live in southern Africa, while 7.6 million people living in Asia are infected. Three million people died of AIDS in 2003.

Future generations will regard the AIDS epidemic as among the greatest tragedies of modern times. We know that we have the tools and the science to stop the disease and to heal the sick. Bush’s failure to take the necessary steps in that direction just to please the large pharmaceutical corporations or to teach object lessons to poor countries about paying their debts is inhumane and cruel, if typical of the scope of his administration’s record over the last four years. Such a brutal regime needs replacement.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor fo Political Affairs and can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.



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