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Papua New Guinea: Official Addresses Parliamentary Probe on HIV/ AIDS

Posted on: Friday, 25 November 2005, 09:00 CST

Text of report in English by Papua New Guinea Post-Courier website on 25 November

A total of 1.5m kina was spent in the past year on buying drugs to treat people living with HIV/AIDS - money that Papua New Guinea does not have. This amount was for drugs that were used to treat 255 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), accessing the antiretroviral treatment therapy (ART) at the Port Moresby General Hospital's Heduru clinic.

National Department of Health's technical adviser on sexually transmitted infections (STI) Dr Daoni Esorom told the parliamentary- led inquiry on HIV/AIDS in Port Moresby yesterday that 500 people were still waiting to be put on the treatment. The amount does not include the funds spent on treating the 23 PLWHAS at Angau hospital in Lae. This hospital has 80 people on the wait list.

The programme will be extended to other centres later. The antiretroviral programmes are funded by the World Health Organization and the Asian Development Bank which is pulling out at the end of this year and its assistance will be continued by the Global Fund for the next five years. He said there would be a disaster when the donors stopped funding the programme and the HIV epidemic was worse than many in PNG have realized. He said PNG had responded late which meant that it was not only affecting a certain group of people such as sex workers but everyone was now at risk.

Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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