The Bush regime’s recent commitment to African AIDS relief – two million sufferers on antiretroviral drugs and seven million HIV infections prevented by 2008 – surprised many of its critics. In this stark overview of the AIDS crisis, Peter Gill gives credit where it’s due but doesn’t hide his anger that it’s taken until now, the 25th anniversary of the epidemic, for significant progress to be made. What, he asks, have activists, politicians, church leaders and pharmaceutical companies been doing in the interim? Arguing among themselves, mostly, about the ethics of condom use and needle-exchange programmes.
The heroes here are charities like Médecins Sans Frontières, which had the courage to take on Big Pharma and insist on the need for cheap generic drugs. But even then there were doubts, as agencies spoke of ‘bringing heart transplants to facilities that can hardly deliver aspirin’ and Andrew Natsios, former head of USAID, made his notorious remark that it was impossible for Africans to take AIDS drugs with the necessary regularity because they ‘do not know what watches and clocks are’.
A TV reporter as well as a print journalist, Gill writes with crisp economy, whether he’s interviewing ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer, workers on the ground or intellectual patent experts. Much of what he has to say may be familiar to those with more than a passing knowledge of Africa’s problems, but he says it with precision and authority.
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