AIDS Conference: Thousands Gather to Talk Cures, Treatments and Funding for the Global Epidemic

Our return to the United States after a 22-year absence comes at a time of extraordinary hope, a time when we believe that the end of the AIDS epidemic is possible,

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Experts: Africa countries lose out on AIDS funding

African nations are not receiving adequate international funding to fight HIV/AIDS, leaving them to face catastrophic consequences without enough medication, an independent, global medical and humanitarian organization said Thursday.

Experts at Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said Congo is only able to supply anti-retroviral drugs to 15 percent of the people needing them and "patients are literally dying on our doorstep."

In a statement released in Johannesburg ahead of the United Nations world AIDS conference in Washington starting July 22, the organization said African countries worst affected by the pandemic were the least able to provide "the best science" available to fight it.

The group said that while world data by the U.N. has pointed to gains over the disease, donors have scaled back on earlier funding commitments to Africa.

African countries were being increasingly urged to find their own domestic solutions to the AIDS pandemic, it said.

"This is just a cynical excuse for donors to scale back on their earlier commitments of putting an end to this disease. It will have catastrophic consequences for patients," Dr. Eric Goemaere, the organization's senior regional adviser for southern Africa, told reporters in Johannesburg. "It would be outrageous to assume that African states could combat this emergency alone, given their current limited resources."

At the Washington summit, leaders and scientists are scheduled to review programs aimed at eventually eradicating AIDS. But plans to increase treatment and improve the quality of care in developing countries now risks being scrapped entirely as international support stagnated, the organization said.

The Global Fund, a major backer of anti-AIDS projects in South Africa and the region, now faced waning donor interest, it said.

The latest study issued by UNAIDS reports that international anti-AIDS funding hovered at about $8 billion in 2008 and has not increased by any significant amounts since then, forcing some developing nations to increase their own spending to keep existing programs running.

But just as the funds are being squeezed, bounds are being made.

South Africa on Thursday reported a decline in cases of mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes AIDS because of treatment given to mothers and babies aged four to six weeks.

"It has proven that putting mothers and infants on treatment early on really works," Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters.

In South Africa, 32 percent of live births are HIV-exposed and it is estimated 30 percent of HIV-exposed babies will be infected within eight weeks of birth if there is no drug treatment. The country has 5.6 million people living with AIDS, the highest of any world nation, and an infection rate of about 18 percent of the population of 50 million.

According to Doctors Without Borders, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have also reported progress in their AIDS programs.

Malawi was the first to begin prevention of mother-to-child transmission through treating infected expectant and breast feeding mothers.

Stuart Chuka, an official of the Malawi health ministry, said the eradication of AIDS now relied on state-of-the-art medical technology and the money to pay for it.

"Just as success is within reach, we're up against a great financial squeeze. I truly believe we can end AIDS. But we can't do it alone," he said Thursday.

Thierry Dethier, a Doctors Without Borders official based in Congo, said in that country just one tenth of health facilities offer AIDS treatment.

"We receive critically ill patients who have desperately searched for ARV treatment" whose condition had reached the point of death, he said.

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House votes to approve FDA funding bill

Reuters – 4 hrs ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a bill that helps fund the Food and Drug Administration and gives it new authority to prevent drug shortages and speed reviews of medical devices.

Passed by a vote of 387-5, the bill also helps ensure the safety of drugs imported from abroad by collecting higher fees from companies to fund FDA inspections of foreign facilities, and gives drugmakers incentives to make antibiotics for conditions where few treatments exist.

The Senate passed its own version of the bill last week with a near-unanimous vote, and leaders from both sides of Congress must now meet to iron out any differences. House leaders said they are aiming to agree on a final bill by July 4.

The main purpose of the bill is to reauthorize fees from makers of drugs and devices that help speed FDA evaluation of new medical products. These so-called "user fees" could make up nearly half of the FDA's proposed $4.5 billion budget next year, according to a plan from President Barack Obama.

Since the bill provides such a large chunk of FDA funding, it is considered a "must-pass" measure that can serve as a vehicle for broader FDA-related changes.

Both the Senate and House versions, for example, give the FDA power to force drug companies to report any supply disruptions, so the FDA can work with other manufacturers to ramp up production and avoid drug shortages. Certain kinds of cancer, anesthetic, and nutrition medicines have been in persistent short supply in the past few years, often because of manufacturing problems.

Senate lawmakers say they want to work with the House to include a national system for tracking medications in order to minimize the threat of fake or stolen drugs.

The FDA has been pushing for a uniform plan that would track individual vials of medicine. But companies, distributors and pharmacies say it may be too expensive, and propose an alternative plan that would track much larger "lots" of drugs. They say their plan would pave the way for more stringent rules later.

The Senate version of the FDA bill includes room for a law that would require a uniform drug tracing system, but it may be cut if lawmakers cannot decide on the details of the plan.

The Senate and House versions of the bill disagree on some other issues, including some medical device safety provisions, and which antibiotics could qualify for incentives, depending on the medical conditions they treat.

Industry user fees, first enacted in 1992, give the FDA millions of dollars annually to review new products for the U.S. market but must be renewed every five years. The current version is set to expire in September.

Starting this year, for the first time the FDA will collect fees from makers of generic drugs and of copycat versions of complex biotech drugs, known as biosimilars.

(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov; editing by Carol Bishopric)

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Report: State tobacco prevention funding lacking

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Arizona bans funding to Planned Parenthood in abortion fight

Reuters – Sat, May 5, 2012 PHOENIX (Reuters) - Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill banning abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from receiving money through the state, her office said in a statement.

The Republican-backed Whole Woman's Health Funding Priority Act cuts off funding for family planning and health services delivered by Planned Parenthood clinics and other organizations offering abortions.

"By signing this measure into law I stand with the majority of Americans who oppose the use of taxpayer funds for abortion," Brewer said in a statement.

Arizona joins six other states with similar laws, officials said. But three of those states -- Indiana, Kansas and North Carolina -- are facing legal challenges.

Arizona does not provide tax dollars for abortion, but backers said the law is needed to make sure that no indirect monies are funneled to organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortion and other health services. There were no estimates of how much money is involved.

But officials at Planned Parenthood Arizona, the state's largest abortion provider, said the law means that thousands of women in the state may now go without life-saving cancer screenings, birth control and basic health care.

"We are most concerned about the women and men who could be forced to go without health care as a result of this bill," Bryan Howard, Planned Parenthood Arizona's president and CEO, said in a prepared statement.

"We remain committed to providing Arizona communities with the professional, nonjudgmental and confidential health care they have relied on for 78 years," Howard said.

The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List called the bill a "major victory" in its fight to bar funding of abortion providers.

"Abortion-centered businesses like Planned Parenthood do not need or deserve taxpayer dollars," Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of government affairs for the organization, said in a written statement.

While Planned Parenthood suffered a setback in Arizona, it won a temporary battle in court on Friday with Texas. A federal appeals court ruled that the organization could participate in a health program for low-income women in Texas, despite a new state rule there that bans affiliates of abortion providers.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor, Dan Whitcomb, Greg McCune and Lisa Shumaker)

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Funding cuts put 3.4 million TB patients at risk: NGOs

Reuters – Thu, Mar 22, 2012 Article: TB infections drop to record low: CDC

Thu, Mar 22, 2012

LONDON (Reuters) - A $1.7 billion funding shortfall to fight tuberculosis (TB) over the next five years means 3.4 million patients will go untreated and gains made against the disease will be reversed, three non-governmental (NGO) agencies said on Friday.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which has helped prevent 4.1 million deaths from TB, no longer has the resources to expand its work against the infectious disease, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, the Stop AIDS Campaign and anti-poverty group Results UK said in a joint statement.

"We are facing some huge challenges, particularly in that over 80 percent of the external funding that is going into tuberculosis control is going through the Global Fund' and the Global Fund is facing a funding crisis," Aaron Oxley, executive director of Results UK, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"The problem is that infectious diseases don't slow down when the money slows down - they keep infecting and that's building up a bigger problem for us to deal with in the future."

TB is a worldwide pandemic that kills around 1.5 million people a year and is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

The infection destroys patients' lung tissue, causing them to cough up the bacteria, which then spread through the air and can be inhaled by others. In 2010, 8.8 million people had TB, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The three NGOs who issued their statement ahead of World TB Day on March 24, called on governments to scale up funding of TB, HIV and malaria programs at a G20 meeting in Mexico in June in an effort to replenish the Global Fund with $2 billion.

The public-private Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the world's largest financial backer of the fight against the three infectious diseases, said in November it had been forced to cancel new grants and would make no new funding available until 2014.

Oxley said the effect of that decision was to create a funding shortfall of $1.7 billion for work on treating TB over the next five years.

Since it was founded in 2002, the Global Fund says it has helped detect and treat 8.6 million cases of TB.

The international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said the lack of Global Fund money put the fight against TB at risk and would leave countries "unable to aggressively tackle their TB epidemics."

MSF also warned in its World TB Day statement that the spread of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) is much greater than previously estimated.

"Wherever we look for drug resistant TB we are finding it in alarming numbers," said MSF president Unni Karunakara. "And with 95 percent of TB patients worldwide lacking access to proper diagnosis, efforts to scale up detection of MDR-TB are being severely undermined by a retreat in donor funding

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