Harper plays shell-game with HIV/AIDS funding

[GDKitty]

From Canada.com:

Organizations that work in prevention, education and research dealing with AIDS, as well as caring for the tens of thousands of Canadians infected, charge that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government is taking $15 million out of an $84-million national strategy promised by the Liberal government in 2004.

The money was to be distributed over five years.

Instead, $15 million is going to Ottawa's $139-million Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative, which is connected to a global project spearheaded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seeking a vaccine to prevent the disease.

And from the Globe...

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $28-million to the $139-million vaccine initiative announced in February by the federal Conservative government.

The foundation normally insists that money contributed by its partners in AIDS projects must be new funding. But the government admits that $26-million of its share of the vaccine initiative was redirected from previously announced AIDS programs.

Even so, Health Department officials point out that new funding of $85-million more than matches the amount contributed by Mr. Gates.

Partly as a result of the redirection of funds to the vaccine initiative, budgets of community AIDS programs across Ontario have been slashed by 30 per cent this year.

[...]

An Ottawa-based AIDS group is planning a protest on Parliament Hill today [Friday].

And Richard Elliott, the executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, said: "Funding vaccine research and cutting costs shouldn't be done at the expense of existing research of effective programs that help prevent new cases of HIV." The dispute is complicated by the fact that the previous Liberal government promised in 2004 that federal HIV/AIDS funding would gradually increase until fiscal year 2008-09, when it would hit $84.4-million - and then the Liberal Treasury Board turned around and made cuts to that funding.

Ms. Bennett said that when she was minister of state (public health), money was always cobbled together within the public health agency to compensate community organizations for the Treasury Board cuts.

But the Conservatives say they have been unable to find the cash to do that kind of topping up. And they have channelled some of what's left to the vaccine initiative instead of community programs and existing research.

Both links via Frank Frink (comments at ACR)

[sparqui]

Good catch Kitty. I've read before that many African activists are not exactly impressed with the Gates Foundation either for similar reasons. Then there is the questionable ethics behind testing:

CAMEROON: Clinical trial of anti-HIV drug on sex workers in question

YAOUNDE, 27 January 2005 (IRIN) - The government of Cameroon has said it may stop the clinical trial of an anti-AIDS drug being tested on 400 sex workers in the port city of Douala following allegations that the women are receiving inadequate counselling and medical care.

The drug in question is Tenofovir, an antiretroviral (ARV) drug manufactured by the US pharmaceutical company Gilead, which has been sold under the brand name Viread for the past three years.

Now the drug is being tested as a possible prophylactic to prevent people becoming infected with the HI virus.

However, AIDS activists in Cameroon and France have alleged that the women volunteers taking part in the clinical trial in Douala have not been sufficiently informed of the risks involved.

Worse still, they have accused Gilead and its agents who are conducting the clinical trial in Cameroon, of failing to guarantee free healthcare to the sex workers if they become infected during the course of the trial.

These critics say the women would be treated very differently if the same trial was being conducted in Europe or the United States...


...The clinical trial in Cameroon was launched in September 2004 with 400 sex workers who were free of infection from the virus. Half of them were given a daily pill of Tenofovir, the other half a placebo.

Similar trials are being conducted on sex-workers in Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria, and on homosexual men in the United States, with the support of a US $6.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

However, Gilead was forced to scrap the planned trial of Tenofovir on sex workers in Cambodia last year following a similar row over ethics....

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=52813

Personally, I find it distasteful that the Gates Foundation's charitable funding is limited and tied to pharmaceutical corporate interests.

Lots of hits earlier this year regarding the Foundation's questionable investments in such companies as BP Oil etc.:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/299725_gates15.html