JOHANNESBURG - Zimbabwe is one of eight African countries where the AIDS threat is still very real, according to a leading health expert. Alan Whiteside, director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) of South Africas Kwazulu Natal University, said this week that AIDS still posed the biggest risk in many African countries, including Zimbabwe, as they were failing to implement long-term measures to minimise the effects of the killer disease. The other countries mentioned were Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi and South Africa. Whiteside bemoaned what he termed the turning away of global attention from the devastating effects of AIDS, adding that the international community was ticking it off as dealt with, and adding to the problem.
Global attention is turning away from the AIDS pandemic at just the wrong time and this means that a fresh wave of the disease could infect millions of people in these high-risk countries, said Whitehead. Whiteside said health ministries needed to use aid funds now to equip and train health workers and produce safe-sex education programmes to combine the importance of AIDS with a better grasp of the long-term impact of the disease on their countries. In December, the international health funding agency UNITAID approved plans for a drug patent pool to help make newer HIV and AIDS medicines available at lower prices to poorer countries.
Whiteside called on governments to continue to channel funds towards the prevention and treatment of the devastating disease. Millions of Africans are currently on HIV/AIDS treatment, courtesy of the Americans, the Global Fund and other donors, he said. Those treatments have to be for life, so if we see a redeployment of funding, people are simply going to die.
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