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 News from Around the Americas | July 2005 
Clinton Takes Cheap AIDS Drugs to African Children
 Reuters
| | Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, 58, left office in 2001. |
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton hopes his foundation will help treat more than 60,000 children suffering from HIV/AIDS as part of a plan to fight the disease in poor countries, he said on Sunday.
Clinton was speaking at a children's hospital in the Mozambique capital of Maputo on the first leg of a six-nation African tour, to see how the AIDS pandemic is affecting children in the world's poorest continent.
The former president said in April his foundation would spend some $10 million this year on treating 10,000 children afflicted by HIV/AIDS in poor countries, particularly in rural Africa. "We hope to add another 50,000 children next year. We think that at the end of next year we will have about 60 countries buying medicines through my contract and we are negotiating to try to add more producers to it," Clinton said on Sunday.
The Clinton foundation negotiates with generic manufacturers to supply poor countries with life-prolonging pediatric anti-retroviral drugs at affordable prices.
About half a million children worldwide are estimated to be living with HIV, but only a fraction receive treatment, Clinton has said. In impoverished Mozambique, the initiative will help increase the number of children in treatment from 700 to over 6,500 by 2006 and support the creation of the country's second pediatric HIV care center, in the central region of Beira.
Clinton, 58, left office in 2001. He will also visit Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda.
Clinton Dedicates New Lesotho AIDS Clinic
Associated Press
Former President Bill Clinton dedicated a pediatric AIDS clinic Monday that was established with the help of his foundation to treat children infected with HIV.
Clinton also reviewed progress made by the government in expanding access to HIV/AIDS treatment.
The government, with the help of the Clinton Foundation, launched a program last year that enrolled 5,000 patients across the tiny African kingdom.
The foundation is providing a supply of pediatric anti-retroviral medicine as part of an initiative that seeks to increase the number of children being treated from less than 100 to about 750 by the end of the year.
An estimated 22,000 children in Lesotho are infected with the HIV virus.
"Lesotho is helping to prove that pediatric HIV/AIDS treatment is indeed possible in the developing world," Clinton said. "We are trying all we can to help. Every child has a right to life, to grow up, to have a healthy life, to dream their dreams and to get educated."
Clinton said the government had done a remarkable job in a short term, but that its program needed more funding to provide universal treatment.
Clinton, on a six-nation tour in Africa to check on projects funded by his foundation in the battle against AIDS, visits South Africa next. |
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