Ugandan AIDS crusader fearful of funding cuts

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SCI-TECH

Ugandan

AIDS crusader fearful of funding cuts

Wednesday, 22 Jul, 2009 | 05:46 PM PST |

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-c

CAPE TOWN: Dr.

Mugyenyi helped President W. Bush’s widely praised US AIDS fund treat

millions of people and along the way his Ugandan clinic became the largest

treatment center in Africa.

At 60, he was ready to retire, but he no longer considers

that an option, saying that with funding for AIDS treatment threatened amid

the global economic crisis, he is still needed on the continent most

afflicted by the virus.

Mugyenyi, interviewed Tuesday at an international AIDS

conference, said that without continued funding, Africa risks a return to the

days of ‘wholesale carnage,’ when poor people died because they

could not afford lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs.

Doctors Without Borders, blaming the global economic

crisis and other factors, had said at the conference that a chronic shortage

of drugs to treat AIDS in six African countries could cost thousands of

lives. Goemaere, medical coordinator in South Africa of Doctors Without

Borders, added that in recent weeks, some clinics have stopped accepting new

patients.

Mugyenyi said officials from USAID, the main American

development agency, have told his clinic to stop enrolling new patients.

USAID officials did not immediately respond to requests

for comment. Dr. Goosby, newly appointed by President Barack Obama to

lead US international AIDS efforts, told The Associated Press the US

had not told anyone to stop enrolling patients. It was not immediately

possible to explain the contradiction, but Goosby’s program is separate

from USAID.

In the early 1990s, entire families and villages were

being wiped out in Uganda.

A triple-therapy cocktail of drugs could prolong lives, but was much too

expensive for most Africans.

‘Most people just threw up their hands and said it

was impossible, unmanageable,’ Mugyenyi said.

But India

started perfecting cheap generic versions of AIDS drugs, and Mugyenyi ordered

a batch. They sat at Kampala’s

Entebbe airport,

impounded while Mugyenyi was detained, threatened with jail and called into a

meeting of high-level government officials led by a Cabinet minister in the

president’s office, the doctor said.

Mugyenyi said the government officials pointed to a

court case in South Africa,

which was being sued by 33 pharmaceutical companies and told him: ‘You

must be crazy. If they can put powerful South Africa

in court, what chance does an individual like you stand?’

He said he told the meeting: ‘Each and every one

of you within this room has relatives or friends who have died (of AIDs), or

are in the process of dying if you do not let me have these drugs.’

The officials passed a law to allow Mugyenyi to bring in

the generics, and his clinic went from treating about 500 people who had been

able to afford the more expensive drugs to about 9,000, the doctor said.

When Bush decided in 2003 to help the worst-hit

countries with his President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or

PEPFAR, Mugyenyi was called in as an adviser. In Uganda,

the new funding produced ‘an explosion. We were treating 73,000 people

at the clinic until we were able to second them to other clinics.’

Now Mugyenyi’s clinic is treating 36,500 patients

with PEPFAR funding, but the crisis could be on its way back, he said.

Bush’s fund is credited with saving millions of

lives. Since 2003, the United States

has given $18.8 billion in funding.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to expand the fund

by a billion dollars a year. But the executive director of the Global AIDS

Alliance, Dr. Zeitz, said in Nairobi

recently that the budget Obama’s administration submitted in May

maintains funding levels at a steady US$6 billion a year.

Fifteen countries with half the world’s AIDS

patients are helped by the US fund, 12 in Africa and

Haiti,

Guyana

and Vietnam.

It provides AIDS drugs to more than two million of an estimated 3.5 million

Africans receiving therapy.

Mugyenyi said he has answers for how to get lifesaving

drugs to even more people despite the global economic recession.

Mugyenyi said Africans cannot afford and do not need

expensive routine tests. Dropping them not only frees up money to treat

others but also means people can be treated in rural villages by trained

health care workers instead of doctors and nurses. — AP

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