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Zimbabwe: Clean-up victims face death as they fail to access AIDS drugs - report
ZimOnline
May 15, 2006

http://www.zimonline.co.za/headdetail.asp?ID=12098

HARARE - An international medical aid organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), says several victims of last year's controversial government clean-up exercise in Epworth suburb in Harare could be facing imminent death as they are failing to access life-prolonging drugs.

In its latest report covering the period January to March this year, the MSF said at least 10 percent of the 371 patients they had attended to at Bellapaise Farm in Epworth, were in desperate need of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs).

"Unfortunately there are no referral options anymore for these patients who require ARVs because the waiting lists are full until the end of the year. This is a serious concern; how many patients will survive until the end of the year?"

"The high cost to patients of CD4 counts (needed before starting ARV treatment) is also a barrier to many; patients are currently being charged between Z$3.6 million and 10 million for laboratory tests," says the report.

The report says most of the patients who are living in squalid conditions at the farm will not survive until the end of the year. At least 600 people are living on the farm after their houses and backyard shacks were destroyed in a clean-up exercise defended by President Robert Mugabe as necessary to rid cities and towns of squalor.

United Nations special envoy Anna Tibaijuka said the clean-up exercise left at 700 000 people homeless and directly affected another 2.4 million people in Zimbabwe.

Thousands of HIV patients were also displaced during the clean-up exercise resulting in most of them failing to access their life-prolonging AIDS drugs. - ZimOnline

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