Richard Feachem, director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that the fund will run out of money by the middle of next year unless it receives new donations, the Boston Globe reports. The fund has received $2.1 billion in pledges but has collected only $500 million.
Equity in Health
Feachem Says Global Fund Could Dry Up By the Middle of Next Year
Further details: /newsletter/id/29384
Mozambique, Malawi Accept GM Food As Hunger Bites
Two more southern African countries, Malawi and Mozambique, have followed Zimbabwe's example and have accepted genetically modified (GM) food as starvation takes its toll in the region. President Mugabe, who earlier this year had said he would not allow "his people" to consume GM food, as it was feared to cause negative reactions in human beings, made a U-turn last month by announcing that the country would begin consuming GMs because of the prevalent food crisis.
Netherlands acts against re-sold AIDS drugs
The Dutch government is to recall a large batch of AIDS drugs which were sold at cut-price rates in Africa and illegally re-exported to the lucrative European market. Dutch officials said that more than 35,000 packets of pills with a market value of close to 15m Euros had been re-sold in the Netherlands and Germany, where a similar investigation is being conducted. Two types of Aids drugs were involved, both made byGlaxoSmithKline.
Further details: /newsletter/id/29358
Scientists close in on a mass murderer;
Genome map a big advance but, for now, malaria is still best fought with bednets
Malaria scythes a similarly deadly path across much of Africa, sparing only higher elevation areas that aren't hot enough or countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe, where it has been brought under control. The continent's annual malaria death toll is well over a million and could be as high as two million, with children five and under making up 90 per cent. So you might expect people like Graham Reid - a British tropical medicine expert who manages a Canadian-financed health project in two rural districts of Tanzania - to be very excited about the multi-million-dollar deciphering of the genetic codes for the most prevalent malaria mosquito and the deadliest malaria parasite, dual breakthroughs announced this week by huge teams involving 160 researchers in 10 countries. Experts generally agree that these gene catalogues should accelerate development of affordable malaria vaccines, improved drugs to treat the disease, more effective chemicals to repel the biting mosquitoes and a range of techniques to neutralize mosquitoes that carry the parasite, including designer insecticides. Instead Graham is thinking about $3 bednets and how many lives these could save while the malaria genome breakthroughs struggle through an expected decade-long development process before producing the promised new anti-malaria weapons.
Further details: /newsletter/id/29356
South Africa: Save 3 Million Lives And Prevent 2.5 Million Infections!
Treatment Action Campaign Statement
Urgent action by Government can save 3 million lives of people living with HIV/AIDS by 2015, reduce the number of orphans and prevent new infections. New research demonstrates the enormous social and economic costs our country will face if government does not lead civil society and the private sector in the use of antiretroviral therapy. The Treatment Action Campaign's (TAC) call for a national treatment plan by government with clear budgets and time-frames is the only chance this government has to avoid a social catastrophe.
Further details: /newsletter/id/29349
Southern Africa: Public Health Services need urgent help to combat humanitarian crisis
Four months after the first warnings of an imminent humanitarian catastrophe in Southern Africa, several hundred thousand people may die because funds to provide basic relief for those who suffer have not been raised. The World Health Organization (WHO) has urged international partners meeting at its Geneva headquarters to do more to help Southern African nations stem a tide of death and disease from the humanitarian crisis in the region.
WHO: Candidates Lining Up To Replace Brundtland Next Year
Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Executive Director Peter Piot of Belgium is one of the leading candidates to head the World Health Organization when Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland steps down in July, the Belgian daily De Standaard has reported.
Further details: /newsletter/id/29362
ZAMBIA: Mwanawasa cracks down over food crisis
Human rights groups this week condemned legal action against a Zambian legislator who alleged people had died of starvation in his constituency, thereby contradicting government assurances of no hunger-related deaths in the drought-hit countryside. Vitalis Mooya, the member of parliament (MP) for Moomba, about 240 km south of the capital Lusaka, faces charges of making false statements aimed at causing public alarm, a jailable offence under Zambian law.
Zimbabwe: Government defends HIV/AIDS programme
The Zimbabwe government's HIV prevention mother-to-child transmission programme (PMTCT) has come under fire from AIDS activists over the slow pace of implementation. But government officials have warned that there was more to the programme than just dispensing nevirapine, the drug that can cut HIV transmission rates by 50 percent. Initially started as a pilot project in three urban sites in 1999, the PMTCT programme has been scaled-up. Thirty-five of the 59 registered health centres throughout the country are now administering nevirapine to HIV-positive pregnant women, Dr Agnes Mahobva, the programme's technical Officer, told IRIN.
Famine, Fears Spark Debate Over Biotech Food
Drought and famine stricken nations in southern Africa should not reject donations of genetically modified food, officials from the United States, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization argued at the WSSD last week. The statements come in response to recent decisions by Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe to reject offers of U.S. aid due to concerns about biotechnology.