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“Because of no (anti-retroviral) treatment, 250 000 people will die in 2003 (in South Africa),” Achmat said.
The summit, supported by among others the World Bank and the World Health Organisation (WHO), set out to guage the readiness of countries should treatment become available and to share experiences on treatment advocacy and literacy.
WHO announced recently that three million people needed to receive treatment by 2005. It is estimated that about six million people presently need anti-retroviral treatment worldwide.
Achmat said that getting treatment to people was the biggest and most difficult task ahead but that “we are not scared of difficult tasks”.
He said that a few years ago people living with HIV/AIDS had never thought it possible to challenge drug companies or the bureaucracy of WHO.
Achmat praised WHO for its “bold statements” that without health there could be no development and that poor countries had to treat people with HIV/AIDS and use anti-retrovirals.
He said this had been made possible because of a growing international movement for treatment.
“But it has become clear that HIV and AIDS are deeply political issues,” Achmat said adding “not the party politics of Bush versus Clinton, or the politics of Putin, or the politics of Thabo Mbeki, but the politics of inequality.”
This inequality, he said, included “inequality between men and women, gay and straight men, between different countries and races or inequality within countries.”
He accused the South African government and President Thabo Mbeki of denying people the right to life by abusing and misusing science.
“Good science is the search for truth and we have an enormous opportunity to benefit from science, whether we are literate or not,” he said.
Achmat said activists had to be fearless in defending principles, but needed to be cautious in poor and small countries when it came to tactics.
“We need to be cautious, not because we are scared, but because we need a bigger army than them,” he said.
A report of the summit will be compiled and released soon.
This article is courtesy of Health-e News Service.
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