[Canada] Lewis urges action on AIDS war

from The Globe and Mail

UNNATI GANDHI

Globe and Mail Update

TORONTO — Canada needs to shed its “delinquent” and “hypocritical” position on AIDS and step up as a world leader in fighting the global pandemic, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa said in Toronto Wednesday.

Stephen Lewis presented a four-point platform to stop the disease from spreading and improve the quality of life of people living with HIV/AIDS, including a call to double research and development funding for tools such as microbicides and vaccines.

He appealed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to accept these points as “a direct challenge to Canada to move to taking a stand rather than lapsing into the amorphous banalities and irrelevance to which the Canadian government seems so severely addicted.”

Last week, Mr. Harper received a copy of the plan penned by the Global Treatment Access Group and the Make Poverty History campaign in advance of the International AIDS Conference beginning Sunday in Toronto. Mr. Harper has said he will not be attending the conference.

Mr. Lewis said it's this lack of political leadership that has forced celebrities to emerge in the fight against AIDS.

“Everybody from Bono to Oprah to Alicia Keys to Angelina Jolie to — every time you turn around now — Madonna,” he said.

“I think [celebrity influence] is useful within limits ... but nothing can compensate for governmental involvement.”

The Prime Minister's Office declined to comment Wednesday.

The Global AIDS Crisis: Four Steps for Canada plan asks Ottawa to commit to a binding timetable to bring its developmental assistance up to 0.7 per cent of gross national income; to invest in developing countries' health-care systems; to cancel these countries' debts so that money can be freed up to fight HIV/AIDS; and to follow through on commitments to make generic drugs to control the disease more affordable.

Canada is the only country of the 22 that endorsed the 0.7 per cent target that has not yet set a deadline, Mr. Lewis told a packed press conference.

“The United Kingdom has said it will reach the 0.7 per cent by 2013, France by 2012, Germany and Italy by 2015. Canada ... refuses to set a timetable. That's not only delinquent, but it is — as people have said — hypocritical.”

Canada also needs to keep its promise to cancel debt owed by African countries ravaged by HIV-AIDS, said Gerry Barr, co-chair of the Make Poverty History campaign.

“There is no better time or place than here in Toronto at the International AIDS Conference for Canada to announce that it will step up to the mark in the struggle against the pandemic,” Mr. Barr said.

Mr. Lewis, who was appointed as the UN special envoy in 2001, said Canada should focus its support on two or three countries — instead of funding the current 25 — so that they can “turn the pandemic around” one country at a time.

Erik Waddell, a spokesman for Health Minister Tony Clement, who will be attending the conference, said Canada is “committed to improving access to less expensive medicines that are urgently needed to treat HIV-AIDS, but also other diseases like malaria and tuberculosis in developing countries.”

But Mr. Lewis said Canada has not delivered on its promise to enable exports of lower-cost, generic medication to developing countries as outlined in the 2004 Jean Chrétien Pledge to Africa Act. No drugs have yet been sent, although one is in the process of being developed, according to a spokeswoman for Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

“I feel almost personally duped. I actually believed with a kind of charming innocence that the governments of Canada — Liberal and Conservative — would really take this act seriously and I made a significant error in judgment,” Mr. Lewis said.

“All it takes, and it could be done this week, is for the government of Canada to issue a compulsory licence for the manufacture and export of generic drugs. ... I mean, it is absolutely not beyond us to break the back of the pandemic.”