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julianna

hi regan what a nice read. i think the one thing that jumped out at me as a european hiv positive woman was your dilemma to be a good ambassador abroad but to also engage openly and feel free to share honest thoughts - including critical analysis. i think you should be first of all an amabassador for the hearts and minds of people with hiv and aids - or at least all of those who because of an hiv test have been labelled for life , and advocate for them and second for drug companies who persuade for one the usa government to threaten trade embargoes on nations in debt who they have hit with predictive aids and hiv stats and told they must scale up treatment with - usa pharma drugs, and not their own. there is no way to whitewash it . it is just not true to say they wont have money if they make drugs cheaper or if individual countries manufacture generically. in addition it is not true for orthodox hiv medicine to dismiss the many wonderful successes with chinese medicine and other herbal alternatives in terms of efficacy. when we talk about resource poor settings how dare corporate america tell the rest of the world what it can and cant try . but it persists in doing so , while rolling out sympathetic frontmen and women to make it sound palatable to very desperate people. I spent some time in thailand and at the Mercy Centre in Klong tuoey and saw how ravaged the little children with aids were there from poorly designed meds. Their life expectancy then was 12 . It broke my heart to sit and play with them and talk with the littlest ones knowing they would be dead so very young . I watched 7 year olds crawl in diapers from side effects .Ilistened to aid workers allude to the lethal nature of the medicine and I wondered if aids had become a fund raiser for a form of community develop ment that is willing to sacrifice a few to human experiment to resource overseas funding for unrelated aids work under the banner of 'prevention'. I think i am right to say this happens often. It seems to me that we have now legitimised a form of drug pushing and that in the fear generated by the 'infectious' nature of hiv , we will put any kind of medicine into poor people , indigenous peoples and people who are desperate to live. Is it right to only provide a first line treatment to a mother and tell her it is to save her life when she will never have a second line if it'fails'. There is a real LACK of a Moral Compass in the entire Global Pharmaceutical AIDS Agenda, and it leaves me for one with a very bad taste in my mouth that thankfully is no longer as a result of meds - which I binned a year ago in disgust at the ICC scandal in NY. I think you are sincere and trying to do good but I hope we will see more detached and critical reporting on hiv industry .

July 25, 2007