AIDSfreeAFRICA in the News
New Paltz Oracle October 12, 2006
Ithaca News: Volunteers Jen and Katie received drawing supplies from local merchants to take to Bamenda Cameroon. A school with 106 mostly orphans and many HIV positive are waiting to meet Jen and Katie. The students will draw pictures that will be sold in the US to raise money to fight AIDS.
Founder and president of AIDSfreeAFRICA Dr. Rolande Hodel:
Letter to the Editor: By Dr. Rolande R. Hodel, President 7/4/05
Chemical & Engineering News Volume 83. Number 27, Page 9.
After reading the New York Times in depth coverage and praise of the $437 million in grants the Gates Foundation was awarding to 43 scientists, I could hardly wait to see what C&ENews had to add to this from a Chemists point of view. Disappointingly little as it turned out, it was barely a page. The Gates challenge put out 14 goals that the foundation wanted scientists to pursue. As summarized by the NYT, they included: vaccines that need no refrigeration and can be given without needles; vaccines that create immunity with one dose and are safe for newborns; new ways to kill or cripple mosquitoes; more nutritious staple crops; better animal models for human diseases; blood tests that can be done in villages without electricity; and new ways to attack diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis when they are dormant. Truly forward looking and inspiring, this challenge has been compared to Kennedy’s inspirational statement that did land mankind on moon. Did the condition that the results can be patented but have to be made available to developed countries at low cost or free spark the disinterest?
In any case, as a Chemist I am humbled to see that such a powerful foundation believes that it is science that holds solutions to the world’s persistent inequities. However, I would like to expand on that and assert that we already have solutions. We know how to provide clean water and energy. Most childhood diseases cost pennies to cure and many children still do not get vaccines although they are available. We know how to prevent the death of 8500 people from AIDS in Africa alone. The most needed HIV/AIDS drugs have been released from patent protection. Why are they not produced in sufficient quantities and at affordable price?
September 17, I will travel to Kenya, Uganda and Cameroon to survey possible production sites, conduct needs assessments and secure agreements to build manufacturing plants to produce off-patent generic HIV/AIDS drugs strictly for local use. I challenge each C&ENews reader to get involved. It may take a village to raise a child, but it will take the world to save the world.
For more information please visit http://chem.qc.edu/~aidsfree
Dr. Rolande R. Hodel, Ph.D.
125 South Highland Ave. 3-B1
Ossining, NY 10562
914-923-2073
RRHodel@aol.com
Source: New York Times June 28, 2005
New Ideas in Global Health Get a $437 Million Assist
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: June 28, 2005
A better banana and a less-toxic cassava, childhood vaccines hidden in spores and drunk with fruit juice, mice that develop AIDS and many other exotic dreams of public health scientists will share $437 million in grant money, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation announced yesterday.
The 43 projects were the winners of a competition announced by Mr. Gates two years ago to find new ways to attack the greatest health challenges facing people in poor countries; the contest attracted 1,500 proposals from 70 countries.
The 43 Projects That Will Share the Grant Money
AIDS has a woman’s face
Letter to the Editor: By Dr. Rolande R. Hodel, President
9/20/04
http://www.msmusings.net/archives/2004/11/from_ms_mag_aid.html
This is also true for the many women in Africa who take care of the sick and dying, while dying themselves. Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS Africa, is a truly remarkable man. Seemingly tirelessly advocating and calling on our compassion and humanity, he sees hope the research underway today to find a microbicide, a cream or gel that a woman would use before intercourse to kill any HIV/AIDS virus. However, as of today there has been no breakthrough and although the effort has to be supported, funded and pursued, reality is that it may very well take another 10 years before succeeding. 10 years, while every day 8500 people die, in Africa alone. Living in New York, that is more than two World Trade Center attacks every day. Lewis also advocates for a program called “3 by 5”. It marks the World Health Organizations goal to provide 3 Million Africans with AIDS drugs by 2005. A moderate goal considering that currently an estimated 26 Million Africans need drugs. According to Lewis, because of lack of will by most of the developed countries to donate the money needed the program will most likely fail.
What is there to do? If we give them the principle of how to produce drugs for themselves and help start production locally we safe money, lower transportation, label drug prescriptions in an understandable local language, and do what women do best, empower people to help themselves. And that’s what AIDSfreeAFRICA has set out to do: we have been invited to Cameroon to first train people with the goal of establishing production. There are mountains to move, and we will, because we have already begun. My collaborator Carole McArthur, Professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City, UMKC, is the director of the US-Health Program at a University in Cameroon. With the help of her collaborators, the backing of the government and many more people we will start the training. We need money, equipment and people who are committed to make a difference. One day at a time, we are contributing towards the final goal: an AIDSfreeAFRICA. For questions, donations, and offers for any kind of help send an e-mail to RRHodel@aol.com
Source: MS Magazine
AIDS Has a Woman's Face
Can microbicides help overcome the sexist nature of the global pandemic?
Stephen Lewis, former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, has since 2001 been U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Last spring, at the Microbicides 2004 conference, Lewis’ keynote address stressed the centrality of sexism to the pandemic. The speech (edited excerpts below) rings with a welcome consciousness and passion rarely articulated by any official, especially a male official.
There’s an amiable irrationality in racing across the ocean for a half-hour speech. But the discovery and availability of microbicides is one of the great causes of this era. Here is where morality and science join.
If there’s one constant throughout the years I’ve been U.N. Special Envoy — years spent traversing the African continent — it’s the thus-far irreversible vulnerability of women. It goes without saying that the virus has targeted women with a raging, Darwinian ferocity. It goes equally without saying that gender inequality is what sustains and nurtures the virus, causing women to be infected in ever greater, disproportionate numbers.
The report issued by UNAIDS on the eve of the 2002 International AIDS Conference identified startling percentages of infected women. UNICEF’s Carol Bellamy used a phrase there that would become a mantra: "AIDS has a woman’s face."
Women’s acute vulnerability didn’t happen overnight. What should shock us is how long the world took to focus. Why was it only in 2003 that a U.N. Task Force on the plight of women in Southern Africa was appointed? Why did it take until 2004 to form a Global Coalition on Women and AIDS? Why have we allowed a continuing pattern of sexual carnage so grave as to lose an entire generation of women and girls?
In 2003, Botswana did a study on HIV prevalence. In urban areas, for women and girls ages 15 to 19, the prevalence rate was 15.4 percent; for men and boys the same age, 1.2 percent. For women between 20 and 24, the rate was 29.7 percent; for men that age, 8.4 percent. For women between 25 and 29, the rate was 54.1 percent; for men, 29.7 percent. The reason we’ve observed — and still do, without taking decisive action — this wanton attack on women is because it’s happening to women. You know it and I know it.
African countries, external powers, bilateral donors, even the U.N. — no one shouted from rhetorical rooftops or called an international conference, although in the 1990s it seemed that all we had time for were international conferences. This is the ultimate vindication of the feminist analysis. When the rights of women are involved, the world goes into reverse. For more than 20 years, the numbers of infected women grew exponentially.
Now, virtually half the infections in the world are among women — and in Africa the rate is 58 percent, rising to 75 percent between the ages of 15 and 24. This is a cataclysm. Yet while finally (after the doomsday clock passed midnight) we’re starting to get agitated, little is changing. Please believe me. On the ground, where women live and die, very little is changing.
A few years ago, I visited the prenatal health clinic in Kigali, Rwanda, meeting with women who had decided to take a course of nevirapine. They were excited and hopeful, but asked a poignant question: "We’ll do anything to save our babies, but what about us?"
Back then, more than four years after antiretrovirals were in widespread use in the West, we simply watched the mothers die. Today, thanks to the Columbia School of Public Health, funded by several foundations and USAID, and working with the Elizabeth Glaser Foundation, UNICEF and governments, the strategy of PMTCT-Plus (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission Plus) has begun in several countries, where the "Plus" represents treatment of the mothers and partners — indeed, the entire family.
But it’s a slow, incremental process. In principle, the majority of such women will one day fall under public antiretroviral treatment through their ministries of health. But there’s no guarantee of when, or if, that day will dawn. It’s entirely possible that men will be at the front of the bus. Everything proceeds at a glacial pace when responding to the needs and rights of women.
We deplore patterns of sexual violence against women — violence that transmits the virus — but the malevolent patterns continue. We lament the use of rape as an instrument of war, but in eastern Congo and western Sudan, possibly the worst-known episodes of sexual cruelty and mutilation are occurring, and the world barely notices. We see Rwanda’s women survivors, now suffering full-blown AIDS, demonstrating how such stories end.
If you would like to join the AIDSfreeAFRICA team or would like to make a donation, please feel free to contact any of our board of directors’ member at:
AIDS_free_AFRICA@yahoo.com
For Credit card donations, please go back to home page and click on donation button.
Learn more about AIDSfreeAFRICA: