![]() "(Red) is a gateway drug into a bigger movement." "To change the world we need consumer power idealists and activists alone will not get the job done," Bono told me. Not until I met Bono, the U2 singer, activist, and guest editor of this issue, did I understand what a fiendishly ingenious concept it is. Buy a $170 pair of sunglasses and save the world? Give me a break. I admit to having been skeptical at first about the concept behind (Red). The Global Fund gets most of its financing from world governments, but a growing proportion ($25 million by the end of 2006) comes from an altogether unlikely set of benefactors: Western retailers and the shoppers who can't resist them. This medicinal miracle wouldn't be possible without the efforts of foundations such as the Global Fund, which began distributing free ARVs in Rwanda in 2004. While there is still no cure for aids, some patients have been restored to vibrant normalcy in just three months. Antonin Kratochvil's photographs accompanying this article show the extraordinary transformation that can take place in critically ill patients after as little as 40 days of ARV treatment. These two survivors are examples of what is being hailed as "the Lazarus effect." In the Gospel of John, Jesus raises a man named Lazarus from the dead, and in essence that's what these drugs are doing for people with aids. Compared with the state she was in in 2004, she thinks she will survive. Even if she dies, her brothers will take care of her children, but she doesn't think she will. ![]() She has a support system, which many don't. Her two children are with her mother, so there is social sharing of the burden. He took off and is no longer in the picture. Later on, as you see, she became pregnant by a man, who also has H.I.V. She made friends here and gets food from the center, so two years ago she moved here to be close to it. She is from Gikongoro, but she came here for treatment, which is common: usually they come from far away, because they don't want the community to know. Mutabazi says, translating as the woman tells her story. ![]() "She was infected by her husband, who died in 2004, leaving her with two children," Dr. One of the outpatients, a 35-year-old pregnant woman who is also on ARVs, is strong enough to lead us at a fast clip through banana and cassava shambas to her house, a few hundred yards from the health center. The drug companies were well aware that the African market for anti-retrovirals is huge and getting bigger all the time: roughly 28 million Africans are living with H.I.V., and roughly 15 percent of them are in dire need of ARV therapy. They accomplished this not by appealing to the corporations' sense of compassion but by pointing out that, if you sell 1,000 times as many drugs at one-hundredth the price, you still increase your earnings tenfold. In 2003, a coalition of activists led by former president Bill Clinton pulled off the heroic feat of persuading four manufacturers to make ARVs available to developing countries for $140 a year. But the drugs' high price-a year's supply can exceed $10,000 in the developed world-has kept them way out of reach for most Africans. As the drugs have improved, becoming less toxic and easier to take, they have largely turned aids in the Western world from a death sentence into a manageable disease. "Now there are much fewer patients, because of the ARVs."įirst introduced in 1987, anti-retroviral drugs-ARVs for short-block H.I.V.'s assault on the body's immune system. ![]() So what gives? Where are all the sick people? "All the beds used to be full," says Dr. This local government facility sits on a hilltop on the outskirts of Rwanda's capital, Kigali, where some 7 percent of the population is infected with H.I.V., the human retrovirus that causes aids. I am not sure what I expected to find inside the aids ward at the Kinyinya Health Center, but it sure wasn't empty beds.
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