UN Launches AIDS Treatment Guidelines for Poor Countries

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, July 10, 2002

UN Launches AIDS Treatment Guidelines for Poor Countries

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The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday launched new guidelines aimed at improving AIDS treatment in poor countries in a bid to benefit millions of people currently unable to obtain life-saving therapies.

The UN agency made its announcement jointly with the International AIDS Society at the current International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain. The agency said the new guidelinessimplify highly complex anti-retroviral drug (ARV) therapy so thatit can be used in settings lacking adequately trained medical staff and sophisticated laboratories.

At present, fewer than 5 percent of people who require treatment in developing countries can have access to the therapy. Africa, the continent that has been hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, is even less well served, with fewer than 2 percent of those needing the life saving drug therapy able to get it.

The UN agency said Tuesday that potentially, at least 3 millionpeople needing care could get ARVs by 2005 - a more than tenfold increase in the developing world.

"For the first time we now have the chance to apply a simplified, easy-to-follow public health approach to AIDS treatment rather than complex individual treatment regimes," explained WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland.

"This, combined with the falling costs of medicines, means it should be possible to extend the life-span of those living with HIV in resource-limited settings," the director-general said.

In the United States, the introduction of triple combination ARV therapy in 1996 led to a 70 percent decline in AIDS deaths, according to the agency. The same profound effects have been felt in developing countries such as Brazil, where AIDS deaths decreased by 73 per cent since the introduction of the therapy.

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