Harris tackles Government over HIV/Aids
The Government was today accused of failing to set a good example on tackling HIV/Aids.
Ahead of next week’s G8 summit, former Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Dr Evan Harris, said the UK had been poaching thousands of doctors and nurses from sub-Saharan Africa.
Addressing a question to the Prime Minister, he also criticised the Government for sending Aids sufferers back to those countries from where it was poaching doctors and nurses.
His comments come as senior figures at the World Health Organisation (WHO) admit that they are unlikely to meet their targets for delivering HIV/Aids drugs.
Mr Blair replied that it would be “grossly unfair” to imply that the UK had not been taking a lead on HIV/Aids. The UK was leading the international commitment to get action on drugs, health clinics and staff, he said.
Mr Blair said sub-Saharan African countries were not going to be helped by the UK refusing to take doctors and nurses who were going to leave anyway, and would go elsewhere if they did not come to the UK.
There had also been a lot of concern about HIV/Aids sufferers coming to the UK to be treated, he said.
Meanwhile, a progress report suggests that the WHO is some way short of achieving its “three by five” target that aims to get three million people on to treatment by the end of 2005.
Dr Kim Jim, head of the WHO HIV/Aids programme, said the organisation had known the target would be tough to achieve and stressed that huge strides have been made in rolling out anti-retroviral drugs.
And he committed the organisation to working even harder to improve global access to treatment.
“It is going to be extremely difficult to reach that target, but the point is that we are going to get to three million. The scale-up is happening in every single country in the world,” he said.
Efforts to expand treatment have been hampered in a number of developing nations by a lack of coordinated strategy and in many cases acute shortages of staff.
