Africa: Lewis Applauds Clinic's "Great Accomplishment"

Pressure and momentum from the efforts of individuals, organizations and governments in Africa to finally treat people with HIV/AIDS provide glimmers of hope to Stephen Lewis, UN's special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Co-founded by Waterloo locals Stephen and Sylvia Scott, who grew up in Kenya, the Matangwe Community Health Centre opened in 2001 with over $500,000 in financial assistance from the Waterloo area. Grassroots efforts like the center - which treats people for opportunistic infections, delivers babies, and provides critical health care - are laudable, and the clinic is a "great accomplishment," Lewis, a veteran Canadian diplomat, said in a telephone interview. "We're not talking about huge amounts of money" that can provide hope, said Lewis, who urged local donors to continue funding the center.

Lewis' own foundation is helping orphans, women dying with AIDS and people living with HIV/AIDS, with the aim of helping organizations with no other available financing.

A consortium including the Clinton Foundation, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria has negotiated a generic-drug deal that brought the cost of antiretroviral drugs down from $500-$600 for brand-name drugs to $140 per person. Still, the need will outpace supply for some time.

Treatment is reaching 1-5 percent of patients who have reached a certain stage of AIDS in Botswana, Uganda and Rwanda, Lewis said. Kenya's plan to provide free AIDS drugs "provides real hope for Kenya because the new government's pretty determined to overcome the pandemic," he said.

Two years ago, many sick patients could barely make it to a northwest Uganda hospital where Doctors Without Borders supplied AIDS drugs. Now, there are 1,100 receiving treatment, "they're well," and another 2,500 will soon start treatment, said Lewis. "The availability of treatment resulted in so much hope, so much awareness, that all of the stigma, all of the inhibitions, were gone."

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