United Nations Wire Alert

Tuesday, April 11, 2000

HIV/AIDS II: Vaccine Expert Criticizes S. Africa Boycott Plan

The head of a global group spearheading the search for an HIV vaccine yesterday denounced calls for a boycott of an international AIDS conference to be held in South Africa in July.

Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), said that boycotting the XIII International AIDS conference would be irresponsible and wrong, according to Reuters.

"This is not the time to undercut efforts to address developing country issues, particularly because the next two international conferences are scheduled to be held in industrialized countries," Berkley said.

Scientists are considering staying away from the meeting after South Africa announced plans to include researchers who have doubts that HIV causes AIDS on a panel of international experts.

Critics were concerned that the scientists' views would be given credibility if included, and perhaps even slow efforts to stop the spread of AIDS in South Africa. An estimated 10% of the country's 40 million people are HIV-positive.

Berkley said the conference would provide an unparalleled opportunity to share information and shed light on critical questions about the disease, which has claimed 16 million lives since the early 1980s (Patricia Reaney, Reuters/CNN Interactive, 10 Apr).

UN Goodwill Ambassador Calls AIDS "Everyone's Disaster"

Meanwhile, in a commentary in the New York Times today, South African author Nadine Gordimer, a goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Program's Race Against Poverty project, calls the global impact of HIV/AIDS "everyone's disaster" and a problem that is as much the developed world's as Africa's.

Gordimer says that only now are countries like South Africa realizing that the disease "was not the unfortunate problem of our poorer neighboring countries, but was our own." And now, it "is no longer a problem but a catastrophe," she writes.

While cure and prevention are possible, they lay in the "hands of medical science" and depend on money, she says. However, countries that have the power to donate funds have focused until now only on certain areas, like the northern hemisphere, she says.

"At the level of international -- global -- responsibility, the total sum needed annually for AIDS prevention in Africa is on the order of $2.3 billion," she writes. "Africa currently receives only $165 million a year in official assistance from the world community."

Gordimer also emphasizes the importance of countries financing their own solutions to HIV/AIDS, pointing out that by 2004, 1.1 million people in South Africa alone could be infected by then.

"If, in developing countries, defense budgets continue to leave HIV budgets relegated to a footnote," Gordimer writes, all we shall have left to defend in the end is a graveyard" (Nadine Gordimer, New York Times, 11 Apr).