Competition between drug companies and generic producers has been far more effective in ensuring cheaper anti-AIDS drugs than negotiations with drug companies. This is despite a massive humanitarian initiative launched two years at the 13th world AIDS conference by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and five of the world'€™s biggest pharmaceutical companies aimed at ensuring that developing countries had access to cheaper drugs. KERRY CULLINAN reports.

Giving pregnant HIV positive women two anti-AIDS drugs rather than one substantially reduces the chances of them passing the virus on to their babies, delegates to the 14th world AIDS conference in Barcelona were told yesterday (Monday).

A new drug called Tenofovir is being researched to see whether it can prevent HIV infection if it is taken before a person is exposed to the virus. Kerry Cullinan reports.

In the depressing statistics frenzy that often characterises world AIDS conferences, there is one shining success story that defies the stereotype. Uganda is poor, rural and in sub-Saharan Africa. Those three factors alone should condemn it to being a helpless case in the eyes of the developed world.

The impact the AIDS epidemic is having now, will be worse in the years ahead and the way to change it'€™s course is to try and see where the epidemic is going rather than relying on crystal ball modeling. Speaking at the 14th World AIDS Conference, Professor Alan Whiteside, Director of Natal University'€™s HIV/AIDS Research Division said it was clear from the agenda that the scientists knew a great deal, but little was known on the social science (impact) of the epidemic.

Human rights campaigner Irene Fernandez sent out a battle cry at the 14th International AIDS conference calling on the world to see health as a right not a commodity. ANSO THOM reports.

There is no longer any reason to believe that it should not be possible to get anti-retrovirals to poorer nations, the World Health Organisation said today (Monday). Addressing the first session of the 14th International Conference on HIV/AIDS, Dr Bernhard Schwartlander, director of HIV/AIDS at the WHO said Brazil had shown the way in that it actually cost less money to give people anti-retrovirals that to just let them die.