Word: hiv
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While researchers were celebrating the latest AIDS advances in Vancouver this summer, Rosemary Omuga had other things on her mind. Since testing positive for HIV in 1992, the Kenyan mother of four has lost both her job as a midwife and her home. Today she barely earns enough to keep her children alive and cover her $12 monthly rent on a tin-roof shack in one of Nairobi's most fetid slums. Treating her illness is low on her list of priorities. In a good week, when she gets paid to give talks about AIDS to employees of the local...
...deadliest epidemic. But a vaccine, which would address the problem, is not a top priority in Western laboratories. Indeed, with the new optimism on AIDS, some are beginning to talk about reducing funding for basic research. That, according to Piot, would be a fatal error. "As long as HIV exists somewhere in the world," he says, "it threatens...
Meanwhile, AIDS is tightening its grip outside the U.S. and Western Europe. In India, researchers estimate that by the year 2000, anywhere from 15 million to 50 million people could be HIV positive. Half the prostitutes in Bombay are already infected, and doctors report that the disease is spreading along major truck routes and into rural areas, as migrant workers bring the virus home. In Central and Eastern Europe, countries that had largely escaped the epidemic are seeing an explosion in the number of cases, mainly among IV drug users and their heterosexual contacts...
...then there is Africa, across much of which the disease continues to rage unchecked. Already the sub-Saharan region accounts for more than 60% of people living with HIV worldwide, or some 14 million men, women and children. As many people will die there this year from the disease as were massacred two years ago in the Rwandan holocaust. The social consequences of this die-off are catastrophic. By the year 2000, nearly 2 million children in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia will have lost their parents to the disease...
...majority of those with HIV outside the U.S. and Europe, the cost of the new "cocktail" treatments seems a cruel joke. The average Kenyan would exhaust his annual income in less than a week on the regimen. In India, where the government imposes 100% to 150% customs duty on pharmaceuticals brought from overseas, even a two-drug treatment can run to $3,500 a month, or more than 75 times the monthly earnings of poor laborers, who are the prime victims of the disease. "The new drugs will help the yuppies of the world," says Thailand's Mechai Viravaidya...