Dearth of medication stymies AIDS battle in Africa

GULU, Uganda — After many years of marriage, Aceng Lodah's husband took a young second wife. But the girl grew gaunt and died after only a few years. Then Lodah's husband died as well. In 1996, two years after burying him, Lodah took an AIDS test and found out she, too, was infected.

Now the 53-year-old, who lives in a displacement camp in war-torn northern Uganda, struggles each day to find the strength to hoe her meager vegetable plot and to care for seven children — four of her own and three left behind by a sister who also died of AIDS.

"I don't know who will take care of them if I die," she said quietly. The neighbors, who shun families touched by AIDS, "say it would be better if we all died fast," she said.

Uganda has waged one of Africa's most successful campaigns to stem the spread of HIV-AIDS, dropping its national prevalence rate from 18 percent in 1992 to around 6 percent today, largely as a result of a broad public education campaign.

But a long rebellion by the brutal Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda has pushed that region's HIV infection rate to double the national average. And a continuing lack of access to AIDS treatment drugs — a widespread problem in Africa — means women like Lodah may not remain healthy enough, or live long enough, to raise their families.

Lack of access to anti-retroviral drugs is the biggest problem facing AIDS treatment efforts on the continent, said Dr. Robert Colebunders, a Belgian researcher at Uganda's new international Infectious Disease Institute at Mulago Hospital in Kampala. The sparkling new center will train doctors from across Africa to correctly administer AIDS medications, but most African governments — including Uganda's — have barely begun to make the drugs available.

That was one of the concerns at last week's meeting in Tanzania of donors to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The United States, the fund's largest donor, had proposed putting off the next round of grants to fight the diseases, arguing that international donors had not met their funding commitments.

But AIDS activists charged that a year's delay in getting funds out to new projects — particularly AIDS treatment programs — would mean many of their clients might be dead before help becomes available. The United States eventually relented after four African presidents, including Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, insisted the funding was key to supporting social and economic progress in Africa.