Guyana Provides Greater Access to Free HIV/AIDS Drugs

Text of report by Caribbean Media Corporation news agency website on 24 January

Georgetown, Guyana: The Guyana government has provided nearly 11,000 nationals with the anti retroviral (ARV) drug treatment for the deadly HIV/AIDS virus, the Government Information Agency (GINA) has said.

GINA said that the number of persons accessing the treatment programme has accelerated since 2005 and that the government “intends to ensure that 80 per cent of pregnant women living with the deadly disease gain access to ARV’s through the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) programme”.

Official government statistics here estimate that nearly five per cent of the 730,000 population have contracted the virus.

Guyana and Haiti are the only Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries currently benefiting from the US5bn dollars package made available by President, George W. Bush two years ago to fight the global epidemic.

There are several foreign-funded HIV AIDS programmes running simultaneously in Guyana, and according to GINA, in June 2006 the Guyana government, “in conjunction with the United States Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) refurbished the Genito Urinary Medicine (GUM) clinic…to increase its treatment capacity”.

“More than 11,000 Persons Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWA) have so far benefited from ARVs treatment at the GUM clinic,” GINA said.

The GUM clinic housed at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) was the first centre in Guyana offering HIV/AIDS treatment using the anti-retroviral drug after the disease was first detected here in 1985.

In 2005, the Guyana government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Clinton Foundation on HIV/AIDS for one year’s supply of ARVs for infected children, “and subsequently moved to begin manufacturing the drug and making is available free of cost to infected persons,” GINA said.

(c) 2007 BBC Monitoring Americas. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.