Here's a quote from an article the Guardian.co.uk website:
Advances in children's survival, health and education are being reversed by a "triple whammy" of Aids, conflict and poverty, according to the UN children's agency, Unicef.
The disease is driving the destruction of basic services for 1bn children and violating their right to grow and develop, said Carol Bellamy, the organisation's executive director.
"We believe Aids is the worst catastrophe ever to hit the world," she told the Guardian. "It is just ripping up systems, be it health or education. Our children's childhood is being robbed from them."
The following excerpt comes from an article from The AP and Yahoo News and deals with just this kind of bullshit:
President Thabo Mbeki's ruling party published a stinging attack Friday on top U.S. health officials, accusing them of treating Africans like "guinea pigs" and lying to promote a key AIDS drug.
The criticism reinforces fears of doctors and activists that new questions about the testing of nevirapine could halt use of the drug that's credited with protecting thousands of African babies from catching HIV from their mothers.
The article, published in the online journal ANC Today, was responding to Associated Press reports this week that U.S. health officials withheld criticism of a nevirapine study before President Bush launched a 2002 plan to distribute the drug in Africa.
Documents obtained by AP show Dr. Edmund C. Tramont, chief of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS division, rewrote an NIH report to omit negative conclusions about the way a U.S.-funded drug trial was conducted in Uganda, and later ordered the research to continue over the objections of his staff. Tramont's staff worried about record-keeping problems, violations of federal patient safeguards and other issues at the Uganda research site.
"Dr. Tramont was happy that the peoples of Africa should be used as guinea pigs, given a drug he knew very well should not be prescribed," the article said. "In other words, they entered into a conspiracy with a pharmaceutical company to tell lies to promote the sales of nevirapine in Africa, with absolutely no consideration of the health impact of those lies on the lives of millions of Africans."
BigBusiness putting cold cash in front of human lives.
Yay.
Read more about the UN's opinion at Guardian.co.uk.
Read more about the conspiracy to throw the health rights of Africans out the window at Yahoo News.
From the Guardian.co.uk website:
The greatest catastrophe
Aids worst disaster in history, says UN chief
Rory Carroll and Sarah Boseley
Friday December 10, 2004
The Guardian
The HIV/Aids pandemic is the worst catastrophe in history and is blighting childhood across the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said yesterday.
Advances in children's survival, health and education are being reversed by a "triple whammy" of Aids, conflict and poverty, according to the UN children's agency, Unicef.
The disease is driving the destruction of basic services for 1bn children and violating their right to grow and develop, said Carol Bellamy, the organisation's executive director.
"We believe Aids is the worst catastrophe ever to hit the world," she told the Guardian. "It is just ripping up systems, be it health or education. Our children's childhood is being robbed from them."
But the agency and Ms Bellamy have been strongly criticised by the editor of one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet.
In an editorial published today, Richard Horton said Unicef's "preoccupation" with children's rights meant that the fundamental right to survival was, "shamefully", not at the core of its work. "In sum, for almost a decade, child survival has failed to get the attention it deserves," he writes.
In Unicef's 150-page annual report, The State of the World's Children 2005, the agency paints a bleak picture of sub-Saharan Africa slipping further behind other developing regions such as southern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Researchers also found that
· Of the 15m children orphaned by Aids, 80% are African
· One in six (90m) children are severely hungry
· One in seven (270m) have no healthcare at all
· Nearly half of the 3.6m people killed in war since 1990 have been children.
"Unless action is taken, swiftly and decisively, to stem the tidal wave of infection and loss, it is estimated that by 2010 over 18m African children will have lost one or both parents to HIV/Aids," said Ms Bellamy.
She said there were bright spots: an effort to eradicate polio was back on track, Kenya had introduced free primary schooling and rates of HIV appeared to be falling in Namibia. "We are not saying everything has fallen apart."
But without identifying them she accused governments of "shutting their eyes" to HIV and the erosion of gains made since the adoption of the convention on the rights of the child in 1989.
The report sounded alarm over the growing number of orphans deprived of a normal family environment and exposed to violence, abuse, exploitation and stigmatisation.
"The loss of a parent implies more than just the disappearance of a caregiver. It pervades every aspect of a child's life: their emotional well-being, physical security, mental development and overall health. In the most extreme cases, children can find themselves living on the streets, utterly devoid of family support."
The extended African family network of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins has been credited with shouldering the burden but Unicef warned that this safety net was severely stretched, especially in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
Aid workers and government agencies have issued similar warnings that romanticised notions of heroic relatives selflessly raising broods of infants can mask an uglier reality.
In the South African village of Kamhlushwa, for example, an uncle offered to care for the six Ndlovu children, aged four to 11, after both parents died earlier this year. But neighbours said he was interested only in their social grants and that it would be better if the eldest child, Thembeni, were the head of the household.
Around 1.9m children under the age of 14 in sub-Saharan Africa had the HIV virus, said the report, and around 1,700 children worldwide became infected every day. But few African countries had followed Brazil's lead in giving life-extending anti-retroviral drugs to children and adolescents as part of a national treatment programme.
Social indicators in many parts of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean showed improvement but almost half of the world's 2.2bn children lived in poverty.
In a foreword to the report, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said that for such children reality was "starkly and brutally different" from the ideals of the millennium declaration adopted in 2000 as a blueprint for the 21st century.
"Poverty denies children their dignity, endangers their lives and limits their potential. Conflict and violence rob them of a secure family life, betray their trust and hope. With the childhood of so many under threat, our collective future is compromised."
The report is likely to be welcomed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as another spur to their plan to write off African debt, tackle disease and break down trade barriers during Britain's presidency next year of the G8 industrial nations.
But Ms Bellamy said that after a decade at Unicef she considered the development glass half full, not half empty.
However, Mr Horton is scathing of Unicef's approach. In his editorial he is specifically critical of Ms Bellamy, saying it has been her "distinctive focus" to advocate the rights of children.
"This rights-based approach to the future of children fits well with the zeitgeist of international development policy," he writes. "But a preoccupation with rights ignores the fact that children will have no opportunity for development at all unless they survive.
"The language of rights means little to a child stillborn, an infant dying in pain from pneumonia or a child desiccated by famine.
"The most fundamental right of all is the right to survive. Child survival must sit at the core of Unicef's advocacy and country work. Currently, and shamefully, it does not."
He adds: "Child health needs better leadership, improved coordination of services and increased funding."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
S. Africa Attacks U.S. Over AIDS Drug
December 17, 2004
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS, Associated Press Writer
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - President Thabo Mbeki's ruling party published a stinging attack Friday on top U.S. health officials, accusing them of treating Africans like "guinea pigs" and lying to promote a key AIDS drug.
The criticism reinforces fears of doctors and activists that new questions about the testing of nevirapine could halt use of the drug that's credited with protecting thousands of African babies from catching HIV from their mothers.
The article, published in the online journal ANC Today, was responding to Associated Press reports this week that U.S. health officials withheld criticism of a nevirapine study before President Bush launched a 2002 plan to distribute the drug in Africa.
Documents obtained by AP show Dr. Edmund C. Tramont, chief of the National Institutes of Health's AIDS division, rewrote an NIH report to omit negative conclusions about the way a U.S.-funded drug trial was conducted in Uganda, and later ordered the research to continue over the objections of his staff. Tramont's staff worried about record-keeping problems, violations of federal patient safeguards and other issues at the Uganda research site.
"Dr. Tramont was happy that the peoples of Africa should be used as guinea pigs, given a drug he knew very well should not be prescribed," the article said. "In other words, they entered into a conspiracy with a pharmaceutical company to tell lies to promote the sales of nevirapine in Africa, with absolutely no consideration of the health impact of those lies on the lives of millions of Africans."
Smuts Ngonyama, an African National Congress spokesman and editor of the journal, said the article was an opinion piece by a member and didn't reflect official party policy. He wouldn't identify the author.
In the United States, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a U.S. congressional investigation and demanded nevirapine no longer be distributed in Africa.
"This was not a thoughtful and reasonable decision, but a crime against humanity," Jackson said Thursday in Chicago. "Research standards and drug quality that are unacceptable in the U.S. and other Western countries must never be pushed onto Africa."
Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the NIH's No. 2 infectious disease specialist and one of Tramont's bosses, has said an internal review cleared Tramont of scientific misconduct.
He said Tramont changed the report because he was more experienced than his safety experts and had an "honest difference of opinion." Tramont has also argued that Africans in the midst of an AIDS crisis deserved some leniency in meeting tough U.S. safety standards.
Some 70 percent of the 45 million people worldwide infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.
Studies have shown that a single dose of nevirapine to an infected woman during labor and another dose to her newborn can reduce the chances of HIV transmission by up to 50 percent. Nevirapine is also used in combination with other drugs to prolong the lives of AIDS patients.
Subsequent research has confirmed the safety and efficacy of nevirapine in protecting newborns, according to the World Health Organization. But there's evidence women who receive a single dose during pregnancy can develop resistance to the drug that can compromise their future AIDS treatment.
WHO recommends nevirapine be used in combination with other drugs where possible — a strategy that has reduced transmission to less than 1 percent in wealthier countries. But it says resistance concerns must be weighed against the practicality of administering a single dose of nevirapine in impoverished African countries.
Doctors and AIDS activists in Africa are worried governments may now halt use of single-dose nevirapine before alternatives are available.
"It's an issue affecting people's lives," said Dr. Saul Onyango, who was involved in the testing in Uganda. "A lot of damage has already been done."
Activists in South Africa accused the Health Department and ruling party officials this week of putting out misleading statements that could frighten patients off their treatment.
"There is to date not a single life-threatening adverse event associated with this regimen which is widely used in the developing world," the Treatment Action Campaign said.
In July, South Africa's Medicines Control Council recommended that nevirapine only be used in combination with other drugs because of the resistance concerns.
The Health Department this week welcomed U.S. concerns about the quality of nevirapine research in Uganda, saying it supported its cautious attitude to the drug.
Until this year, Mbeki's government refused to provide anti-retroviral drugs through the public health system, citing safety and cost concerns. A coalition of doctors and AIDS activists won a 2002 Constitutional Court order requiring the government to immediately expand a pilot nevirapine program to all infected pregnant women.
© 2004 The Associated Press
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