[838] in peace2
June 23 March: ACT-UP wants to talk to you. (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Fri Jun 15 11:29:46 2001
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Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:29:40 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:06:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Rajiv Rawat <rrawat@hsph.harvard.edu>
Subject: June 23 March: ACT-UP wants to talk to you.
Hi!
Sorry for distributing this as a blank carbon copy, but June 23rd is
looming as a big day for AIDS activism, and it would great if Boston had a
large contingent in New York City. What show of strength we put up in NYC
will determine how the campaign to bring affordable drugs to developing
countries goes.
ACT-UP Philly has been at the forefront of this movement, so please, if
you can spend the day in NYC, it would be very helpful. Tell your
friends!
The AIDS in Africa Project of the Boston Global Action Network
is mobilizing, please contact kiaranh@yahoo.com for more details or visit
http://www.stopglobalaidsnow.org/
- - R
- -----------------------------
(from Katie Krauss, ACT UP Philadelphia * katie@critpath.org)
(forgive duplicates)
June 13, 2001
Dear activists,
For the past two years, ACT UP Philadelphia has belonged to the Health GAP
Coalition, fighting to stop the U.S. government and big drug companies
from blocking access to medicine in the Global South, home to 90% of
people with HIV on our planet.
We have brought thousands of people to the streets, locked down in trade
officials' offices, disrupted Congress and participated in international
mobilizations.
We have explained the truth about AIDS medications -- that you do not need
to take it every 2 hours, it is not 30 pills a day, and that people have a
right to decide if they will risk side effect to combat a life-threatening
virus -- in the face of relentless misinformation from drug company
lobbyists. We have made obscure-sounding trade policy understandable and
compelling to AIDS activists, and brought AIDS issues to the forefront of
anti-globalization struggles.
But it has not been enough.
Maybe we are destined to win -- the truth is compelling: that drugs are
cheap to make, that lifesaving treatment are the key to reigning in the
escalating epidemic, and that we can no longer deny treatment to millions
in need.
But right now, I must tell you that this is not the case. We are facing a
major backlash, because we have struck at the core of injustice and greed.
We may lose this fight. We need reinforcements.
In the past few weeks, Peter Piot, the head of the UN agency on AIDS;
several high level World Health Organization staffers; and now Andrew
Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
have all stepped forward to disparage the effort to get AIDS drugs into
developing nations. Meanwhile, more than 35 million real people are dying
of AIDS; 95% live in developing nations.
On Friday, Bush-appointee Natsios stated in a Congressional hearing that
that Africans will never be able to deal with AIDS drugs because they
can't tell time (see the New York Times editorial reprinted below).
Health GAP has called for his resignation.
The life expectancy for a person in sub-Saharan Africa with HIV is between
6-8 years. More than 1 million people are dying every three months without
treatment. It is a holocaust and it is happening partly because of the
racism of US government officials.
U.S. officials prefer to put all monies into prevention programs --
programs increasingly and impractically stressing abstinence and fidelity
to a planet in which millions of women are infected by their husbands --
and write off people who are already infected. This is what they have done
for years and what they know how to do. We need more money for truly
effective prevention programs, but we can no longer allow our governments
to deny treatment to millions of people with AIDS.
On June 23, we are going to draw the line.
Join us and a broad coalition of activists in New York City from around
the world on Saturday, June 23, for the rally and march that demands:
donate the dollars drop the debt treat the people.
This march will combat the poisonous rhetoric of the Bush Administration,
and the life-threatening timidity of international officials cowed by drug
companies and the U.S. Government.
We need to show the world that thousands of us in the United States have
an unfailing commitment to people with AIDS around this world -- that they
have a right to live and thrive, that their lives come before profits, and
that our overtly racist government does not represent us.
Let me be clear -- Our biggest need is to get people to come to this march
- -- not to say they will, not to pass around an email, but to make sure
that a lot of people really show up.
We need to stand together to fight this backlash.
Please organize your direct action group, your policy group, your summer
session, your church, family, your support group and your group house.
Carpool, take a bus, hop a train, book a cheap flight on-line. Join us.
To strategize turn-out and travel, please email me or give me a call at
215-985-4448, ext. 168.
Katie Krauss
ACT UP Philadelphia
katie@critpath.org
p.s.: It's Pride Weekend in NYC on June 23, so you can also support the
GLBT community at marches and events at the same time.
Below is an editorial in the New York Times about Natsios's comments:
- -------------
June 11, 2001
Refusing to Save Africans
By BOB HERBERT
Giving the back of his hand to the suffering of millions, a key Bush
administration official is opposing any extensive use of the
life-extending anti-AIDS drugs in Africa, insisting that the health care
infrastructure is too primitive and that Africans, in most cases, are
incapable of following the regimen.
As head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios
is the administration's point man on foreign aid. In an interview with
The Boston Globe, he said the money raised by a new global fund to fight
AIDS should be used almost entirely for prevention services, not for the
antiretroviral drugs that have been so successful in extending the lives
of people infected with H.I.V.
Painting with a very broad brush, Mr. Natsios said attempting to get the
drugs to Africans any time soon would not be worth the effort because of
the difficulties posed by a lack of roads, shortages of doctors and
hospitals, wars and other problems.
According to Mr. Natsios, the problems extend to the Africans
themselves. Many Africans, he told The Globe, "don't know what Western
time is. You have to take these (AIDS) drugs a certain number of hours
each day, or they don't work. Many people in Africa have never seen a
clock or a watch their entire lives. And if you say, one o'clock in the
afternoon, they do not know what you are talking about. They know
morning, they know noon, they know evening, they know the darkness at
night."
This view of Africans as so ignorant they can't master the concept of
taking their medicine on time has become a touchstone of the Bush
administration. Back in April, The Times's Joseph Kahn reported on
concerns voiced by an unnamed senior Treasury Department official: "He
said Africans lacked a requisite `concept of time,' implying that they
would not benefit from drugs that must be administered on tight time
schedules."
Africans may be dying by the millions from AIDS, but the brutal
stereotyping of the Dark Continent lives on, encouraged by U.S.
government officials who should know better.
Mr. Natsios's primary response to the epidemic that is roaring like a
fireball across southern Africa is to just say no. "Just keep talking
about prevention," he told The Globe. "That is the strategy we're using
even though I'll be beaten up and get bruises all over me from the
fights on the subject."
Mr. Natsios may not realize it, but just talking about prevention has
failed. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 25 million people are infected
with H.I.V., and more than 17 million have already died. In South
Africa, which is being brought to its knees by this epidemic, the rate
of infection for all people 15 to 45 years old has nearly reached 20
percent.
The United States, a rich and healthy nation, cannot close its eyes to
suffering on such a colossal scale. There is medication available to
ease the suffering and its cost is coming down. Now the steps must be
taken to get the medicine to the people in need.
I spoke with Mr. Natsios last Thursday. He conceded that in South Africa
and the country with the worst outbreak of AIDS in the world, Botswana,
the health care infrastructure is, in fact, pretty good.
As for the difficulty Africans or anyone else might have following the
daily antiretroviral regimen, now might be a good time to burst a widely
held misconception. Antiretroviral therapy does not always require
patients to take dozens of pills a day.
"Our patients take two pills in the morning and two pills in the
evening. That's it," said Toby Kasper, an official with Doctors Without
Borders, which recently established an antiretroviral therapy program
for patients in a village in South Africa.
The trend in drug therapies - in the U.S. and elsewhere - is toward
newer, more consolidated regimens that are easier to follow.
Mr. Natsios reluctantly acknowledged that some limited use of
antiretroviral treatment in Africa may be O.K., and he said he didn't
mean to offend anyone with his comments about African concepts of time.
The truth is that both prevention and drug therapy are desperately
needed in Africa.
No one believes antiretrovirals can be effectively administered in
countries that are at war, or in areas devoid of doctors and hospitals
or clinics. But there is a role for antiretroviral therapy to play in
the catastrophe in sub-Saharan Africa.
And it would be to the everlasting shame of the United States if its
officials proved to be a barrier to that kind of life-saving treatment.
------- End of Forwarded Message
