AIDS activists jeer U.S. official

HIV-infected Africans shouted down an American official Friday when she tried to defend the U.S. contribution to the fight against AIDS at a conference in Kenya.

In their second protest at the week-long gathering, the activists from across Africa stood up and walked toward the podium, waving placards and whistling and jeering at Leslie Rowe, a diplomat from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

With the slogans "Aids treatment now!" and "Generic drugs now!" emblazoned on placards, they got up from their seats in an auditorium, panicking organizers at the closing ceremony.

The nearly 100 activists of the Pan-African AIDS Treatment Access Movement sang and shouted that the United States should pay more toward the treatment of millions of AIDS victims on the world's poorest continent.

Police were on standby but made no arrests.

"I support their right to freedom of speech," Rowe said, resuming her speech after the activists ended their protest. She said the U.S. government had paid $1 million to help organize the International Conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections in Africa.

President Bush has proposed spending $15 billion to fight the epidemic over the next five years in Africa and the Caribbean. A total of around $1 billion was spent on fighting HIV and AIDS in Africa in 2002.

Only one percent of four million Africans who need the anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS receive them, Medecins Sans Frontieres said in a report issued at the conference.

The U.N. AIDS agency, UNAIDS, says that of the 42 million people with AIDS worldwide, 29.4 million are in Africa.

Peter Piot, the UNAIDS executive director, called on African governments to ensure AIDS funds were used properly and to boost their own AIDS budgets before asking for more.

"The immorality of underfunding will only be properly understood in the capitals of wealthy countries when we can show that AIDS funds are being well spent," he said.

The U.N.'s top expert on AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, said the next step was to implement the World Health Organization's promise to provide antiretrovirals to three million people with AIDS by the end of 2005.

"How are they going to do it, how are they going to choose who to include? Now we hold their feet to the fire and make sure they do it," he told Reuters.

Content provided by ArmMed Media
Revision date: 12 December 2007
Last revised by Amalia K. Gagarina, M.S., R.D.