Reasons For Hope (RFH)
is Search For A Cure's national HIV treatment news series.
RFH covers the latest in developing therapies for treating HIV/AIDS.
RFH is published in over 90 community newspapers and found on many websites for people infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. We encourage your comments and critiques. Email hope@sfac.org Feel free to copy and distribute any and all RFH articles.
Helpful Links
search our site
Why We Should All be in a Clinical Trial
It is hard to get people to join a study of new medicines nowadays. This is mostly because people think the therapies we have are good enough. It's not true. HIV medicines fail some people. And they are too expensive for most of the world to use.
The medicines we have are not a cure, are a lifelong financial burden and have lots of side effects. The only way to see if new therapies work is to test them on people with HIV. The only way to see if a vaccine will work is to test it on people without HIV. If we want the day to come that HIV is a thing of the past the most important thing we can all do is find a study that needs us and join it.
rich=life . poor=death
What I learned at the 14th International AIDS Conference
At the huge conference center in downtown Barcelona, scientists, activists, politicians, reporters and doctors from all over the world came together the second week of July, 2002 for the 14th International Conference on AIDS.
It had a simple message: there are more and better medicines for rich countries and death for the millions with HIV in poor countries.
In the poor nations of the world, where 5 out of every 6 people live, the epidemic is getting worse. In Russia and India it is quietly exploding. Unless something is done immediately, whole countries in central Africa will collapse. It is a moral catastrophe, a political catastrophe and a potential national security nightmare.
There was hand wringing and impassioned speeches demanding the world get its act together and stop the epidemic by giving the small amount of money the world fund needs, a mere ten billion dollars a year.
But compassion was not heard from the most important representative of a powerful country - Tommy Thompson from the Bush administration.
He was the target of a loud demonstration as he talked about American programs that are too small to make a difference, misdirected, and too late for the few they might help.
Even the world's big drug companies have taken steps to help out. They reduced their prices on AIDS medicines to cost, or free and withdrawn from law suits about their patent rights in South Africa, to allow for generic drugs to be used, and donated hundreds of millions to poor countries.
It is a sad commentary on the world that for-profit drug companies are being more generous and sensitive to the plight of poor countries than elected governments that are supposed to care about people.
The world renowned Dr. Joep Lange, the President of the International AIDS Society that held this convention said that the real theme of this conference was access to medicines. He repeated a statement of a friend, who said, "a few years from now people will not be asking where the ten billion dollars are, but where are the 3 million people?"
Bill Clinton demanded money to stop the disease. He said the rich countries should figure out how much each owes of the ten billion needed, and pay their share.
Nelson Mandela joined Clinton in his impassioned plea to get moving.
He said that there are millions of orphaned children in Africa because their parents could not afford the medicines that would have saved their lives.
In two years the next International AIDS Conference will be held in Thailand. At this conference, rich countries will be given their "report card" based on their support for the Global Fund.
We cannot afford to get a failing grade.
In the words of Nelson Mandela, if you don't help the sick and dying then you lose the right to call yourself human.
