[e-drug] Carter, Gates back AIDS fight in Nigeria

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E-DRUG: Carter, Gates back AIDS fight in Nigeria
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[copied from CNN.com as fair use. WB]

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates Sr. offered moral support
Saturday to the fight by Nigeria's president against the AIDS epidemic
ravaging Africa's most populous nation.

Carter praised President Olusegun Obasanjo for his outspoken efforts to
"awaken the consciousness" of Nigerians to the enormity of the disease. He
also lauded what Nigerian officials have described as one of Africa's most
ambitious trial plans to treat between 10-15,000 patients with cheap
anti-AIDS drugs.

The former U.S. president and Gates Sr., the father of Microsoft
billionaire Bill Gates, were visiting Nigeria on the second leg of an
African tour to raise international awareness about the disease. The visit
began earlier this week in South Africa.
"Some nations and leaders in Africa are still in denial about the HIV-AIDS
epidemic," Carter said, calling the AIDS pandemic the "greatest blight on
human beings that the world has ever seen."

He was speaking at a one-day AIDS conference attended by several hundred
government, U.N. and relief officials in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Carter, however, stressed the need for African nations, including Nigeria,
to begin giving inexpensive anti-retroviral drugs to prevent
mother-to-child transmission from pregnant mothers to their unborn fetuses.
"I'm not here to advocate the use of expensive anti-retroviral drugs to
those who already have AIDS," Carter said. "But there is one basic use that
is absolutely crucial and cost-effective. That is ... for a mother who is
about to have a child. She doesn't need to give the disease to her baby.
Her baby can have a life ahead."

Earlier Saturday, Carter and Gates Sr. spoke with community groups and sex
workers in an impoverished Abuja neighborhood.
The Gates Foundation, funded by the software tycoon and overseen by his
father, was providing 25 million dollars between 2000 and 2005 to the
Nigerian government's AIDS control program.

Addressing the conference, President Obasanjo said more than 3.6 million
Nigerian adults, mostly "young, productive members of society," had been
infected with HIV, adding the number was a conservative one and the real
figure was likely much higher and "rising by the minute."
He said previous military regimes had ignored the spread of AIDS.

Nigeria's Health Minister Adolphus Nwosu confirmed the government would
supply anti-retroviral drugs to up to 10,000 sufferers under a trial
program launched earlier this year after several months of delays. So far,
only a tiny few have received the drugs, AIDS groups say.
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