June 04, 2006
So, Where Were You During the Great Holocaust?
Slowed but unchecked, the epidemic's relentless march has established footholds in the world's most populous countries. Advances in medicine and prevention that have made the disease manageable in the developed world haven't reach the rest.In the worst case, sub-Saharan Africa, it has been devastating. And the next 25 years of AIDS promise to be deadlier than the first.
AIDS could kill 31 million people in India and 18 million in China by 2025, according to projections by U.N. population researchers. By then in Africa, where AIDS likely began and where the virus has wrought the most devastation, researchers said the toll could reach 100 million.
This, for a disease we could have gotten under control if we were willing to tell big pharma that it needed to make a little less profit, and spend on people a portion of the money we spend annually on perfumes, or on toys for our cats and dogs.
Posted by zeynep at 12:08 PM | Comments (2)
November 21, 2005
Meanwhile, AIDS continues to kill...
Meanwhile, an enormous number of people continue to become newly infected with HIV/AIDS. The new report for Sub-Saharan Africa is here. (Things are also getting worse in parts of Asia. But here's the graph that struck me, that I have been thinking about all day:
Forty percent of the women in Botswana attending antenatal clinics were HIV positive. Forty percent.
Thirty percent in South Africa. Twenty percent in Mozambique and Zimbabwe (which actually registered a decline).
These numbers are so horrific that I just can't get my head wrapped around them.
Posted by zeynep at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)
November 01, 2005
Bird Flu
When the threat is directed at us, we can talk about overriding patents, spending money, creating vaccines. (Same thing happened back in 2001 with Anthrax. Suddenly, we got tough with Bayer over CIPRO patents.)
So it's not stupidity, it's plain old callousness that we fought Sub-Saharan African countries tooth and nail when they tried to do the same: override patents, spend money on health (instead of paying back odious debts).
We are perfectly capable of understanding the issue when it's us.
Posted by zeynep at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2005
What Did You Do During The Great African Holocaust?
As predicted in the last post, Bush made a sham announcement, announcing money that was already announced, without agreeing to anything else substantive -- in spite of growing demand everywhere in the world to stop this cruel march of death, now. On every major issue on the table, U.S. blocking progress. This is beyond shameful.
This is the greatest crime of our generation.
The director of UNDP, Kevin Watkins, published an op-ed in today's International Herald Tribune. UNDP calculates that 500 children die each hour in Africa due to poverty --which we helped cause through past and current colonialism, and which we could greatly alleviate given our wealth, and given that the IMF --one of the biggest stumbling blocks at the moment-- is basically controlled by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
UNDP estimates that three million children will die each year --each year-- --three million-- -each year-- by 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa unless we change course dramatically, now.
Currently, poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 African children each hour - and the numbers are going up. The United Nations Development Program has just completed a country-by-country assessment of progress in reducing child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The results are not for the faint-hearted.
If current trends continue over the next decade, the region will miss the millennium goals by an epic margin. On our estimates, there will be three million more child deaths in 2015 than there would be if the millennium target were met. By 2015 sub-Saharan Africa will account for two in every three child deaths in the world.
These trends are not destiny. It is difficult to think of any area in which so much could be done to improve human welfare for so little. Consider malaria, which claims the life of one child in Africa every minute. More than three-quarters of these deaths could be averted through a simple net treated with insecticide, costing $3-$5, or simple medicines.
Of course, getting sub-Saharan Africa back on track will take more than initiatives to tackle malaria, AIDS and other major killers. The underlying problem is endemic poverty. Poor households face a double burden: more vulnerable to disease because of malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water, they are also least able to afford treatment and least served by public health systems.
African governments have primary responsibility for developing national poverty reduction plans. But even the best national policies will fail unless Africa can close the chronic financing gaps that restrict opportunities for development.
...The United States, for its part, has increased aid by $8 billion since 2000. Yet the world's largest economy still spends only 0.16 percent of national income on official aid. Indeed, three G-8 countries - Japan, Italy and the United States - are among the nations who give the least aid in proportion to national income.
...
The G-8 summit could also free sub-Saharan Africa, for once and for all, from the shackles of unsustainable debt. All G-8 members agree that more needs to be done on debt. Unfortunately, that is where the consensus ends. There are disagreements over how to pay for World Bank and IMF debt reduction, over whether debt relief should come from existing aid budgets or new resources, and over how much debt relief should be provided. After almost two years of inertia, it is time for the G-8 to agree to a 100 percent debt cancellation.
The world's rich countries have a chance to put in place policies that could prevent three million additional child deaths. Africa's children do not have a voice at G-8 summits. But those avoidable deaths present three million reasons for the rich world to act now, before it is too late.
(Kevin Watkins is the director of the UN Human Development Report Office.)
Can you wrap your head around that? Five hundred children each and every hour. (In the space of four hours, more children will die today in Africa than all the Americans soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion more than two years ago. And this is just Africa. And just children. In four hours.)
A preventable, predictable, steady killing-machine that we helped construct, and that we could easily mute. The numbers are going up. Onward. Upward.
What will we say when future generations ask us what we did during the great African Holocaust?
Posted by zeynep at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2005
Due to Today's Developments, Tens of Millions of People Not-Named Terri Schiavo May Die
Here's a real issue for anyone genuinly interested in a life-affirming culture. In order to comply with World Trade Organization requirements, India is moving towards ending its production of affordable generic drug production.
NEW DELHI (AP) -- International aid groups slammed India's passage on Wednesday of a new patent law that ends the decades-old practice of allowing domestic drug companies to make low-cost copies of expensive Western medicines, saying millions of poor people across the world will be affected.The changes in patent rights stem from India's membership in the World Trade Organization, which enhances the country's participation in global trade but requires it to enforce stricter patent rules for its US$5 billion (euro3.8 billion) pharmaceutical industry.
International aid groups said the new law will curb the supply of cheap generic drugs to impoverished nations, threatening the survival of AIDS and cancer patients there.
Some 50 percent of 700,000 HIV patients taking antiretroviral medicines in Africa, Asia and Latin America rely on low-cost drugs from India. A month's dose of a generic AIDS drug cocktail costs US$30 (euro22), or 5 percent of similar drugs sold by Western producers.
"Because India is one of the world's biggest producers of generic drugs, this law will have a severe knock-on effect on many developing countries which depend on imported generic drugs from India," said Samar Verma, regional policy adviser at Oxfam International.
The Paris-based Doctors Without Borders described the Indian move as "the beginning of the end of affordable generics."
Multinational drug companies welcomed the decision.
It's hard to express how maddeningly sad this development is. India itself has 5.1 million HIV-positive people. There are tens of millions of people around the world that are not receiving these life-saving medicines mostly because of their prohibitive cost. If this proceeds in a manner that continues to please the pharmaceutical companies, the suffering will be immense. The death toll will continue to increase.
Will we care?
Posted by zeynep at 04:06 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 28, 2005
A Little Good News
No, it's not about the glorious exercise in democracy that is about to descend on the Iraqi people.
The FDA has just for the first time ever approved a "generic triple-therapy AIDS cocktail." The rest of the world has been using them for years, of course.
This is of particular significance because of George W. Bush's "Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief." Of his vaunted $15 billion over five years for AIDS relief, only a little over $1 billion has been given to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (this is expected to rise to a little over $2 billion by 2009). The rest goes to his "Emergency Plan," which focuses on 13 African countries, Haiti, Guyana, and Vietnam, and only allows the use of FDA-approved drugs. Thus, while, over the past two years, people have been dying in unprecedented numbers, the administrators of Bush's plan have insisted on paying exorbitant prices for brand-name drugs.
One might even have been forgiven for thinking that the emergency plan was just a cynical scam perpetrated for two reasons:
- To undercut the international, multilateral Global Fund (initiated by the U.N., although you'd have a bloody hard time finding the phrase "United Nations" on its website)
- To provide a boondoggle for American pharmaceutical companies that are running out of places to market their insanely overpriced drugs.
Don't get too excited, though. We still don't know at what price this generic cocktail will be sold. And, says the Global AIDS alliance,
This approval, a full two years after the President’s declaration of a global AIDS emergency, is a positive development. But, the product that was approved is not a fixed-dose combination, and, as a result, is not as easy to take. Also, the company would not have gotten its drug approved without cozy relationships with several brand name companies, something not all producers of essential, generic medications enjoy. As a result, while many more generics are urgently needed to simplify treatment and make it more cost-effective, this might not be replicated any time soon.Anyway, so pathetic is the state of worldwide mobilization against the most immediate global crisis and one of the most severe that even this counts as good news.
Posted by rahul at 06:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 01, 2004
Wondering how the Holocaust Happened? You Can Stop.
The biggest supplier of cheaper AIDS drugs, India, may be forced to withdraw from the market because of "Intellectual Property Rights" (read Profits not Human Rights) regime that India has to comply with by the New Year:
NEW DELHI, Nov 26 (IPS) - As India moves to meet a New Year's Day deadline to comply with the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) the cheap, generic anti-AIDS drugs that this country is famed for could be a thing of the past....
Shiva who is attached to the Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI), a leading health NGO, said Indian pharmaceutical companies that specialise in cheap generics drugs could face legal action, initiated by the WTO, if they continued to manufacture and sell them after Jan. 1, 2005.
''The TRIPS regime (in the WTO structure) has been identified as one of the worst international trade regimes and resistance to it in developing countries has come from farmers, public interest and human rights minded social action groups, as well as drug and health activists,'' Shiva told IPS.
I could have written more about intellectual property rights and the cruel, profit-driven legal regime, but let's cut to the chase. This is a four-and-a-half month old baby. His name was Bongani. Do you have children? Nieces, nephews or cousins? Ever say hi to the neighbor's kids?
He's dead. His mother had AIDS. She's dead too. A short course of AZT would have helped him avoid becoming infected with the disease and given him a chance to join the estimated 15 million AIDS orphans. A few hundred dollars a year, at the generic Indian prices, could have kept his mother alive too. Instead, he became an addition to the more than 20 million people who have already died. Thirty-eight million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV/AIDS, two-thirds of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.
You've heard it before: how did the Holocaust happen; how could people let a thing like that occur; could it even happen again; how can we grasp the enormity of the Holocaust...
Well, this is how it happens. Dehumanization of the victim plus indifference, and all you need is a spark.
It's happening under our watch. And we're worse than the people who let it happen; at least they could claim the Nazis would have killed them too if they resisted. They could claim a legitimate fear for their lives. All we have is our inhumanity, indifference and our unwillingness to tell a few big pharmaceutical companies they'll have to put up with a cut from their obscene profits and let our governments know that we would like a bit of money spent on saving millions of lives instead of say, some big boondoggle project or a special tax-break for this or that big corporation.
Happy World's AIDS Day, otherwise known as 23 shopping days left until Christmas.
Posted by zeynep at 03:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 15, 2004
What Conflict of Interest? Abner Mason, Drug-Industry Frontman and Presidential Advisor on HIV/AIDS, Takes Out a Full Page Ad Attacking Generics
The 15th international conference on AIDS is taking place in Bangkok this week. As I wrote earlier, the Bush administration held back key scientists from attending, citing costs even though AMA was going to pick up the tab for some of the scientists held back -- the U.S. delegation is a third of the size of the delegation that attended the Barcelona conference.
But money is apparently no object to Abner Mason’s group “AIDS Responsibility Project.” The frount group for the drug industry, concentrating mainly against lobbying efforts to block generic drugs boasts Abner Mason as its apparent sole employee and president. Abner Mason also happens to be a member of Bush administration’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He just forgot to disclose his group was funded by big pharma. ::slap forehead:: After all, this is the administration that openly appointed Randall Tobias, former CEO of drug giant and Eli Lilly, which has strong ties to the Republicans, to head its global AIDS taskforce. He might have figured it’s okay and omitted any such mention from his website.
So, Abner Mason’s group takes out a full page ad in Bangkok Post the day the conference begins, attacking generics with bogus claims. More and more data came out at the conference showing that generic drugs are safe, effective and better than patented drugs in many cases because the multiple separately-patented drugs an HIV patient has to take to stay alive can be combined by generic drug-makers.
But what’s safety, efficacy, or the lives of millions of people when some pharma profits are on the line?
In any case, this administration never saw a conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety it didn’t like.
Meanwhile, the government’s own watchdog, Government Accountability Office just released a report examining the administration’s own bilateral drug program that is kept separate from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis. Among its findings are that the on-the-ground staff feels overwhelmingly hindered by “U.S. policy constraints,” specifically the procurement of generics, and wants more coordination and cooperation with the international bodies and existing programs.
Posted by zeynep at 09:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 13, 2004
Onward, Vindictive Soldiers
Somedays of the week, I think this is just a typical administration beholden to corporations, committed to unjust global domination. Then there are other days like these and I wonder if any other administration has matched the level of pettiness or the depth of vindictiveness displayed by this bunch. Surely, show of force is necessary to maintain dominance but it is not sufficient. Dominance in a modern liberal capitalist parliamentary regime also requires a sense of legitimacy, some degree of fair play and a limit to what lengths power can go seemingly simply out of spite.
Take the administration’s actions directed at the AIDS conference in Bangkok. They blocked many Americans scientists from attending the conference, citing costs. There are only 50 U.S. government scientists -- compared to 236 that attended the Barcelona conference, according to the Guardian.
The cost excuse isn’t even thinly veiled: the American Medical Association would have paid for some of the government scientists. Those scientists were blocked them anyway.
One obvious issue the administration has with most of the global scientific community is the role of condoms in prevention. Most people think they’re essential. The administration seems to think that is equivalent to aiding and abetting fornication. Still, it’s hard to imagine that’s a reason not to attend the conference -- why not go anyway and instead promote abstinence-based policies?
But I suspect the real reason is that Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, was heckled at the Barcelona conference two years ago. A series of vindictive actions soon followed suit, most notably malicious auditing of 16 groups some of whose members might have joined in with the heckling, especially to see if they had used any federal funds to send participants to the Barcelona conference as if acceptance of federal funds is tantamount to signing away your first amendment rights.
This administration does not forget its enemies, it’s perceived enemies, or for that matter people perceived of not standing strongly enough with the administration against perceived enemies.
This attitude has wide-ranging ramifications. For one thing, I believe that their electoral strategy is less get the much-touted swing-voter and more turn-out the base. This administration is not that suited to appealing to the confused, “can’t we all get along” crowd but it is very well-suited to creating a paranoid environment where fear rules and a sense of unity and purpose among the ranks is fostered.
Posted by zeynep at 02:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 02, 2004
Another excuse bites the dust in the generic AIDS drugs "controversy"
One more excuse in the malevolent edifice withholding AIDS drugs from poor countries is knocked down: generic three-in-one AIDS drugs work just as well as their pricey patented cousins. A clinical trial in Cameroon was just completed, virtually resurrecting 60 patients on the verge of death with two pills a day, 33 cents per pill.
Normally, it is sufficient to show that a generic is chemically equivalent to the brand-name version in order for the generic to gain approval. But not in this case because, as you all know, we are very concerned with the health and well-being of the 40 million people still living with HIV in countries. Cheap AIDS pill as good as pricey brands:
Lack of scientific evidence about the clinical effectiveness of such generic fixed-dose combinations has until now caused some international AIDS donors to refuse to fund their use....
Washington has barred groups receiving U.S. government funds from buying them [combined generics], insisting only drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration be used.
U.S. officials and Western pharmaceutical executives argue health providers are taking a risk by using medicines which have not passed the rigorous standards of the U.S. drugs watchdog.
There was a flurry around this issue last month because there were some problems with the bioequivalency documentation provided by the Indian generic drug-maker CIPLA. The headlines and the tenor of the stories were very much out-of-proportion with the facts. The problem was relatively simple: a laboratory hired by CIPLA had some missing documentation. The two drugs pulled off the list are expected to be restored as soon as a new lab can redo the testing:
WHO Nixes 2 Approved HIV DrugsWHO did not find any problems during its original inspection of the company, but another laboratory carrying out what are known as bioequivalency tests for Cipla could not provide the required documentation.
"When Cipla presented the information it was all absolutely perfect — everything squared," Bagozzi said. "That sufficed for us to believe that everything had been done properly and there was no quality problem. (The drugs) seemed to be effective and fine."
It was only when the WHO checked the testing laboratory that the problem emerged, she said.
The health agency has asked Cipla to resubmit its documentation to get the drugs back on the approved list. If the laboratory used by Cipla then meets WHO's requirements, the medicines will be accepted again.
Cipla has told WHO that it is contracting a new laboratory and conducting new bioequivalency tests.
But even today’s Reuters story reports that incident as if it were an occurrence that actually pertained to the efficacy of the drugs rather than poor filing practices in one laboratory:
Worries about the quality of Indian medicines were fuelled last month when the WHO removed two Cipla products -- though not Triomune -- from its prequalification list because they had not been proven to be equivalent to the original products.
Note the “they had not been proven to be equivalent” phrase, which is blatantly misleading.
In any case, the latest study takes out the last vestiges from the generics aren’t as good as the brands excuse.
The great advantage of these “fixed-dose pills” is that they combine three anti-retrovirals into one pill. You cannot do that with non-generics because, well, they are owned by separate companies. How could they be forced to do something that might benefit all patients everywhere such as combining their pills -- and divvying up the profits amongst themselves afterwards? Unthinkable.
Along the way, the gushing of concern caused some trip-ups and tangling of the stories. The previous reason we could not provide drugs was that Africans could not follow the complicated therapy regimen:
Some doctors, politicians and pharmaceutical executives have argued that it is unsafe to send millions of doses of antiretroviral drugs to Africa, for fear that incomplete pill-taking will speed the mutation of drug-resistant strains that could spread around the world.For Africa, the issue is particularly touchy because it is tinged with racism. In 2001, for example there was an outcry when the director of the United States Agency for International Development said that AIDS drugs "wouldn't work" in Africa because many Africans don't use clocks and "don't know what Western time is."
Well, that claim turned out to be utterly false as as soon as someone tested it:
Africans Outdo Americans in Following AIDS TherapyContradicting long-held prejudices that have clouded the campaign to bring AIDS drugs to millions of people in Africa, evidence is emerging that AIDS patients there are better at following their pill regimens than Americans are.
It turned out that Africans were much better in compliance than Americans, taking their drugs 90 percent of the time whereas the “average figure in the United States is 70 percent, and it is worse among subgroups like the homeless and drug abusers.”
As soon as the “drug regimen too complicated for Africans” argument was proven to be false the “combination generics aren’t proven to be safe argument” was adopted, without any note of how the latter “concerns” utterly contradicted the former “concerns” since fixed dose pills greatly reduce the complexity of the regimen. You’d expect someone to be concerned about compliance to be very enthusiastic about these simpler fixed-dose combination pills.
Of course, compliance is an important issue with AIDS-drugs, as with many other classes of drugs such as antibiotics, because what doesn’t kill the pathogen makes them stronger, which causes drug-resistance. Half-hearted compliance is the equivalent of creating an obstacle course to weed out the weakest pathogens who then regroup and attack en masse without their weakling relatives to drag them down. You find yourself playing against an NBA squad instead of the neighborhood team.
With about 10 percent of new HIV infections in Europe turning out to be resistant to at least one of the drugs, this is a real issue. It’s clear that fixed-dose pills should be the standard of care -- although one does need to also have access to the drugs in an uncombined state because atypical combinations can be necessary for different patients.
But, there I go babbling again. I meant to say that the obscene profit margins for pharmaceutical companies and huge salaries for their fat-cat executives, with some crumbs channeled appropriately into the political process, should be the first, last and intermediate priority.
Posted by zeynep at 03:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 01, 2001
AIDS, Africa and Selective Vision
In a July 11th article, the British weekly The Economist recounts the latest grim statistics on AIDS, noting emphatically that the 9,000 people who die each day from AIDS represents three times the number killed in the World Trade Center attacks. "If all men are created equal, all avoidable deaths should be regarded as equally sad," says the editorial, adding that "common decency suggests that the rich world should do whatever it can to help." The editorial concludes ominously: "Cynics in the West might write Africa off. Are China, India, Indonesia and Russia to be written off as well?"
Translation?
Africans are poor and black. Thus we (the Economist) realize, dear reader, your greed for profits is not whetted by viewing them as consumers. Nor is your compassion stirred sufficiently by viewing them as fellow human beings. However, be mindful that the fire that has scorched that continent is spreading and is now threatening places populated by people who are prosperous enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to count as potential consumers and pale enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to awaken your caring.
Two daring moves in a world with a cold heart: the bold assertion that all life should be valued equally and the implicit recognition that it is not.
The Economist was responding to the AIDS Conference in Barcelona, held in July 2002, which witnessed protests targeting both the U.S. government and "big Pharma." The substantial influence wielded by the
deep pockets of big Pharma, a fear of setting a precedent that human rights might trump intellectual private property rights, and callous indifference to poor, especially African, life have combined to lead both the Clinton and Bush administrations to attempt to block every reasonable effort by poor countries to obtain generic drugs.
The international disdain for U.S. policy has grown so great that not only was Secretary of Health Thompson booed by protestors the audience gave the protestors a standing ovation -- an occurrence made all the more remarkable when one considers that those attending
the session were not people from the slums of Soweto or landless Brazilian peasants but included largely government officials and representatives of the elite. While thousands of officials from governments and NGOs, scientists and activists flocked to Barcelona, CNN duly reported a notable absence : "Zackie Achmat, of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, was too ill to attend the conference but, in a video address, he said that despite price cuts the drugs that have drastically reduced deaths from AIDS in wealthy countries were still too expensive for people in developing countries."
CNN neglected to mention the fact that Achmat is too ill to travel but because, putting his body on the line for his beliefs, the HIV positive Achmat refuses to take anti-retroviral medicines until they are available to all South African HIV/AIDS patients through the public health system.
Achmat's not hard to reach -- I dug up his home phone number in about 10 minutes. Though I knew better than to ask about his sacrifice or ask too much about his ailing health -- he would simply point out that he was replicating the experience of millions of poor, mostly black or otherwise not-white people on his continent -- I asked anyway, and he said just that. The most personal he got was saying that it was a decision of conscience and that he remains quite comfortable with it.
In the movie version of John Grisham's novel, "A Time to Kill," a young white attorney from the "deep South", Jake Brigance, defends a black man, Carl Lee, who killed the two white men who raped and left his daughter for dead. Carl Lee turns down the hot-shot NAACP attorney, deciding to go instead with Jake. He explains that he needs a white attorney if he is to have a chance to connect with the jury: "See Jake, you think just like them. That's why I picked you. ... When you look at me, you don't see a man, you see a black man." In his closing arguments, an inspired Jake asks the jury to close their eyes and to imagine a little girl, raped, beaten, mutilated and left for dead. The jury is visibly moved, some are openly crying. Then, very deliberately, Jake asks them to imagine that she is white.
Eyes pop open, as the jury members are jolted by the awareness that, even while they thought they had reached the depth of the horror they could feel, in fact they had held back. The people in the jury box, as well as the people in the courtroom, come to the painful recognition that they still had an extra reserve of horror for a white little girl.
Yes, that's fiction. But Jahi Turner and Alexis Patterson are not. Alexis, 7, disappeared on May 3rd and Jahi, 2, on March 25th of this year. To this day, Alexis has been mentioned only six times outside the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and those were all after June 19th, when Elizabeth Smart's abduction in Utah made national headlines. One of the mentions is in a paper in Singapore and five out of the six are more about the disparities in the coverage between Elizabeth and Alexis -- she still functions and appears to us primarily as a black child rather than a missing child. (Oh, did I forget to mention that both Alexis and Jahi are black? And unless you never watch TV or read any newspapers, you already know what Elizabeth looks like.) Similarly, Jahi, who disappeared from a playground in San Diego barely makes the national news, garnering very few mentions outside of California papers.
The disparity in the resources is strikingly clear from even a cursory glimpse of the web pages dedicated to the equally tragic, equally heartbreaking cases. Elizabeth's page lists two toll-free tip hotline numbers, one toll-free information number, one toll-free fax number, one toll-free number for the search center and one toll-free number for the tips. Alexis' page, hosted on a freeserver with a pop-up ad, urges you to call the Milwaukee police department while Jahi's page directs you to the San Diego Police Department. Only Elizabeth's family has managed to garner the resources to offer a reward -- $250,000. Alexis' page doesn't mention a reward, and the only offer on Jahi's page is a gesture to their common tragedy with a prominent link to Elizabeth's page.
In his statement to the Barcelona Conference, Zackie Achmat said in plain black and white terms: "Just because we are poor, just because we are black, just because we live far from you, does not mean that our lives should be valued any less." He appealed once again, as activists have been doing for years now, for pharmaceutical companies and the rich governments to stop blocking poor countries from producing cheap drugs. The rich world hasn't just been miserly and callous, watching a tragedy unfold; we've been blocking efforts by the governments of those poor countries and by popular movements to alleviate the situation. The editorial in the Economist exhorts poor countries to emulate Brazil , "which has made good use of the fact that anti-AIDS drugs can now be bought fairly cheaply outside the rich world, thanks to a liberal interpretation of international treaties on patent law (and also to decent behaviour on the part of many drug companies)."
That "decent behavior," or more accurately behavior that is slightly less egregious than normal for Big Pharma, came only after a sustained and often militant campaign by activists around the world -- and it was only last year that the U.S. dropped its complaint with the WTO against Brazil's insistence on producing its own cheap drugs to fight AIDS and Big Pharma dropped its lawsuit against generic drug imports in South Africa. These lawsuits and threats contributed significantly to delaying the availability of AIDS drugs -- which means more deaths, more orphans, and, incidentally, bringing Zackie closer to death.
In a striking example of selective attention of the media, the Dow Jones archival service, which includes the top 50 U.S. Newspapers, many major news publications as well as the the wires, returns 84 hits for the month of July for the word "Toumai" -- the name given to the seven million year old humanoid fossil skull that was recently found in East Rift Valley, Chad. Type in "Angola" and "famine", the keywords for another story from Africa that also broke mainly in July: 57 returns. There were 27 more newspaper stories about a skull than about widespread malnutrition and starvation so grave that Doctors Without Borders referred to it as the worst African crisis in the past decade.
Toumai means hope of life in the local Goran language, a hope that is fading for millions of children in many places around the world. They are barely clinging to a precarious existence while the rich world seems to tenaciously cling to selective blindness and selective compassion.
Posted by zeynep at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
AIDS, Africa and Selective Vision
In a July 11th article, the British weekly The Economist recounts the latest grim statistics on AIDS, noting emphatically that the 9,000 people who die each day from AIDS represents three times the number killed in the World Trade Center attacks. "If all men are created equal, all avoidable deaths should be regarded as equally sad," says the editorial, adding that "common decency suggests that the rich world should do whatever it can to help." The editorial concludes ominously: "Cynics in the West might write Africa off. Are China, India, Indonesia and Russia to be written off as well?"
Translation?
Africans are poor and black. Thus we (the Economist) realize, dear reader, your greed for profits is not whetted by viewing them as consumers. Nor is your compassion stirred sufficiently by viewing them as fellow human beings. However, be mindful that the fire that has scorched that continent is spreading and is now threatening places populated by people who are prosperous enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to count as potential consumers and pale enough -- barely, but still above the threshold -- to awaken your caring.
Two daring moves in a world with a cold heart: the bold assertion that all life should be valued equally and the implicit recognition that it is not.
The Economist was responding to the AIDS Conference in Barcelona, held in July 2002, which witnessed protests targeting both the U.S. government and "big Pharma." The substantial influence wielded by the
deep pockets of big Pharma, a fear of setting a precedent that human rights might trump intellectual private property rights, and callous indifference to poor, especially African, life have combined to lead both the Clinton and Bush administrations to attempt to block every reasonable effort by poor countries to obtain generic drugs.
The international disdain for U.S. policy has grown so great that not only was Secretary of Health Thompson booed by protestors the audience gave the protestors a standing ovation -- an occurrence made all the more remarkable when one considers that those attending
the session were not people from the slums of Soweto or landless Brazilian peasants but included largely government officials and representatives of the elite. While thousands of officials from governments and NGOs, scientists and activists flocked to Barcelona, CNN duly reported a notable absence : "Zackie Achmat, of South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, was too ill to attend the conference but, in a video address, he said that despite price cuts the drugs that have drastically reduced deaths from AIDS in wealthy countries were still too expensive for people in developing countries."
CNN neglected to mention the fact that Achmat is too ill to travel but because, putting his body on the line for his beliefs, the HIV positive Achmat refuses to take anti-retroviral medicines until they are available to all South African HIV/AIDS patients through the public health system.
Achmat's not hard to reach -- I dug up his home phone number in about 10 minutes. Though I knew better than to ask about his sacrifice or ask too much about his ailing health -- he would simply point out that he was replicating the experience of millions of poor, mostly black or otherwise not-white people on his continent -- I asked anyway, and he said just that. The most personal he got was saying that it was a decision of conscience and that he remains quite comfortable with it.
In the movie version of John Grisham's novel, "A Time to Kill," a young white attorney from the "deep South", Jake Brigance, defends a black man, Carl Lee, who killed the two white men who raped and left his daughter for dead. Carl Lee turns down the hot-shot NAACP attorney, deciding to go instead with Jake. He explains that he needs a white attorney if he is to have a chance to connect with the jury: "See Jake, you think just like them. That's why I picked you. ... When you look at me, you don't see a man, you see a black man." In his closing arguments, an inspired Jake asks the jury to close their eyes and to imagine a little girl, raped, beaten, mutilated and left for dead. The jury is visibly moved, some are openly crying. Then, very deliberately, Jake asks them to imagine that she is white.
Eyes pop open, as the jury members are jolted by the awareness that, even while they thought they had reached the depth of the horror they could feel, in fact they had held back. The people in the jury box, as well as the people in the courtroom, come to the painful recognition that they still had an extra reserve of horror for a white little girl.
Yes, that's fiction. But Jahi Turner and Alexis Patterson are not. Alexis, 7, disappeared on May 3rd and Jahi, 2, on March 25th of this year. To this day, Alexis has been mentioned only six times outside the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and those were all after June 19th, when Elizabeth Smart's abduction in Utah made national headlines. One of the mentions is in a paper in Singapore and five out of the six are more about the disparities in the coverage between Elizabeth and Alexis -- she still functions and appears to us primarily as a black child rather than a missing child. (Oh, did I forget to mention that both Alexis and Jahi are black? And unless you never watch TV or read any newspapers, you already know what Elizabeth looks like.) Similarly, Jahi, who disappeared from a playground in San Diego barely makes the national news, garnering very few mentions outside of California papers.
The disparity in the resources is strikingly clear from even a cursory glimpse of the web pages dedicated to the equally tragic, equally heartbreaking cases. Elizabeth's page lists two toll-free tip hotline numbers, one toll-free information number, one toll-free fax number, one toll-free number for the search center and one toll-free number for the tips. Alexis' page, hosted on a freeserver with a pop-up ad, urges you to call the Milwaukee police department while Jahi's page directs you to the San Diego Police Department. Only Elizabeth's family has managed to garner the resources to offer a reward -- $250,000. Alexis' page doesn't mention a reward, and the only offer on Jahi's page is a gesture to their common tragedy with a prominent link to Elizabeth's page.
In his statement to the Barcelona Conference, Zackie Achmat said in plain black and white terms: "Just because we are poor, just because we are black, just because we live far from you, does not mean that our lives should be valued any less." He appealed once again, as activists have been doing for years now, for pharmaceutical companies and the rich governments to stop blocking poor countries from producing cheap drugs. The rich world hasn't just been miserly and callous, watching a tragedy unfold; we've been blocking efforts by the governments of those poor countries and by popular movements to alleviate the situation. The editorial in the Economist exhorts poor countries to emulate Brazil , "which has made good use of the fact that anti-AIDS drugs can now be bought fairly cheaply outside the rich world, thanks to a liberal interpretation of international treaties on patent law (and also to decent behaviour on the part of many drug companies)."
That "decent behavior," or more accurately behavior that is slightly less egregious than normal for Big Pharma, came only after a sustained and often militant campaign by activists around the world -- and it was only last year that the U.S. dropped its complaint with the WTO against Brazil's insistence on producing its own cheap drugs to fight AIDS and Big Pharma dropped its lawsuit against generic drug imports in South Africa. These lawsuits and threats contributed significantly to delaying the availability of AIDS drugs -- which means more deaths, more orphans, and, incidentally, bringing Zackie closer to death.
In a striking example of selective attention of the media, the Dow Jones archival service, which includes the top 50 U.S. Newspapers, many major news publications as well as the the wires, returns 84 hits for the month of July for the word "Toumai" -- the name given to the seven million year old humanoid fossil skull that was recently found in East Rift Valley, Chad. Type in "Angola" and "famine", the keywords for another story from Africa that also broke mainly in July: 57 returns. There were 27 more newspaper stories about a skull than about widespread malnutrition and starvation so grave that Doctors Without Borders referred to it as the worst African crisis in the past decade.
Toumai means hope of life in the local Goran language, a hope that is fading for millions of children in many places around the world. They are barely clinging to a precarious existence while the rich world seems to tenaciously cling to selective blindness and selective compassion.
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