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22 March 2004
Drug Firm, NGO Form Valuable AIDS Treatment Partnership in Uganda
Glaxo seeks to establish subsidized treatment centers for poor
Washington -- In Uganda, where HIV/AIDS kills 230 people every day, a partnership between the pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Children's AIDS Fund to provide free treatment for the poor could be a model for the rest of the continent, according to Dr. Dickson Opul, executive director and founder of the Uganda Business Coalition (UBC).
Dr. Opul, who has been a primary developer of private-sector-based HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment initiatives in his native Uganda, met recently with leading drug officials and U.S. congressmen, including Representative James McDermott (Democrat of Washington), to discuss the AIDS situation in Africa.
At a March 18 meeting in Washington, Opul stressed the urgency of battling the disease on all fronts, especially at the local level, declaring: "We Ugandans believe in grass-roots solutions: an African solution to an African problem."
Opul said that the search for grass-roots solutions led to establishing a number of AIDS testing and treatment facilities in the Kampala region that would offer free or extremely inexpensive medical treatment and follow-up care subsidized by the government with private-sector assistance.
He noted that one of the primary contributors to this effort has been GSK, which has given some $1.6 million to the Children's AIDS Fund, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Washington to help establish centers for the care of low-income workers with HIV/AIDS and their families. On December 4, 2003, the first such clinic was dedicated in Kampala, with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson in attendance. One GSK official said that although this project is not the final answer, it is an additional step towards defeating HIV/AIDS.
With three such clinics now operating in the Kampala area, serving the needs of some 700 people, Opul hopes that there will be a total of 10 clinics serving perhaps thousands inside and outside the metropolitan Kampala district by the end of 2004.
According to the physician, "Uganda is a fairly small country still struggling with the ravages of war and disease, and the ghost of a cruel former dictator, Idi Amin. In spite of this, we have in place one of Africa's most successful HIV/AIDS education programs, called the "ABC" campaign -- standing for "Abstain, Be Faithful, and Use Condoms" -- which has brought about significant behavioral changes amongst our population, resulting in one of the lowest infection rates on the continent."
In response to a question concerning availability of treatment in the more rural areas of the country, Opul stated that though the current focus is on treating the metropolitan populations, "we do treat people from outlying areas. Treatment interruption becomes an issue when the supply of medications is interrupted, not an issue of whether a patient breaks off treatment when he or she returns to their village."
He added: "We treat patients as family, and if one is not in a family-support system, then we will establish one for that person through our surrogate family programs. This is especially vital in the case of our orphaned children," who now make up one out of every 12 children in the country.
Despite the fact that "some 70,000 Ugandans died from this disease last year, the message for all should be one of hope," he concluded.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
