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“YES WE CAN…Stop AIDS, TB, and Malaria!”

4 Nov 2009

Patrick Adams

Source: TropIKA

Kenyans Rally outside of MIM with a message for Obama

While participants at the 5th MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference discussed the finer points of drug resistance, supply chains, and insecticide spraying as tools for the long term goal of eradication, hundreds of Kenyan demonstrators gathered outside the gates of Kenyatta International Conference Center, singing and dancing under a blazing midday sun. “We want Obama to help us finish the job we started,” said Kilonzo Whitehead, director of a children’s home for HIV/AIDS orphans in the nearby slum of Lelana. “We want him to give more money to the Global Fund so we can stop AIDS, TB, and malaria.”

The protest, organized by Advocacy to Control TB Internationally (ACTION), coincided with MIM’s “Elimination/Eradication Day” with sessions devoted to an integrated approach backed by community leadership, patient empowerment and, perhaps most important, political will. Research released at these sessions—such as the new Population Services International data on access to artemisinin-combination therapies—will provide evidence to inform policy decisions.

Wearing T-shirts and waving placards emblazoned with the iconic Obama “Hope” image, the demonstrators vowed to send thousands of postcards to the President of the United States both thanking the U.S. for its past efforts and urging it to continue scaling up treatment for the so-called “Big 3” at this critical halfway point.

Overall, Kenya, along with low- and middle-income countries in general, is nearly 50 percent of the way towards treating those HIV, TB and malaria patients most urgently in need of treatment. That represents enormous progress since 2003, when a mere 7 percent of people needing ARVs to treat HIV/AIDs were receiving them. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has supported countries in providing more than 2.3 million people with ARVs; 5.4 million people with TB treatment; and 74 million with effective antimalarials.

Still, donor governments’ contributions to the fund haven’t met the demands of high quality proposals to make life-saving drugs available to everyone who needs them. Marching down City Hall Street in downtown Nairobi, the demonstrators sang out in Luo, “Wan wadhi ko-Obama, Wan wadhi chamo yath!” (“We are going to Obama’s place, We are going to get medicines!”) and in English, “Yes We Can! Yes We Can! We Can Stop AIDS, TB, and malaria!”

“As Kenyans, our connection to President Obama is undeniable,” said Dorothy Onyango Executive Director of Women Fighting AIDs in Kenya (WOFAK). “Obama has been here to Kenya, so he knows the reality that people’s lives are at stake. The sad truth is that without his leadership, Africans will have universal access to cell phones before those in need have life saving drugs.”

“Malaria is still a problem in Lelana,” said Whitehead, the children’s home director. The slum, one of Nairobi’s largest with around 40,000 inhabitants, is located on the edge of Ngong forest, half an hour from downtown Nairobi. “There is no drainage, so we have mosquitoes. And to get the drugs you must walk for two hours. The clinic is very far.”

The ACTION project is an international partnership of advocates working to mobilize resources to treat and prevent the spread of tuberculosis, which kills one person every 20 seconds. A project of the Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium (KANCO), ACTION is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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