HIV and AIDS
AIDS in Brazil: a portrait in red
One of the world's most successful AIDS programmes faces new problems
Authors:
Publisher:
The Economist, 2008
This article from the Economist describes how the Brazilian government has sought to control the HIV epidemic spreading across the country. The report details how over the past 20 years the epidemic has expanded from vulnerable groups such as gay men into the general population.
There are three main strands to the government’s response:
- an emphasis on condom use, helped by a recent loan from the World Bank to buy a billion condoms
- government funding of free treatment for everyone with AIDS, which involves bypassing patents on anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs to keep down costs. However this strategy has various limitations, for example the delayed market launch of one new drug despite it having undergone clinical trials in Brazil
- NGOs raising the profile of the problem thus putting pressure on government to act.
The article concludes that the Brazilian government still faces many challenges. Both the demographic shift, and possibility of drug resistant HIV strains arising from poor drug compliance, will make diagnosis and treatment harder.
