0
normal
0 21
Konde-Lule Today is Professor of diseases of epidemic Makerere University, Kampala. The little man with the graying hairline is sitting in his cluttered office in the institution-building next to the central hospital in Uganda's capital. On his desk is stacked research reports that are sorted into colored folders. In addition to the table is groaning under the weight of a crooked shelf full of bulging files. Konde-Lule was in 1982 the research team, which dealt with the strange disease. The blood samples proved that it was not to typhoid fever. "But at what people were killed, we learned only years later," he recalls. He sent some blood samples in the modern laboratories in Europe and the USA. 1984 was identified almost simultaneously in the U.S. and in France the HIV virus and developed the first AIDS test. This showed that people in Uganda were infected with the same virus, such as patients in Haiti and San Francisco.
Equipped with the methods for this Konde-Lule AIDS test in 1987, moved by Uganda. Now the first cases had become known around the capital. The result of the first mass testing Konde-Lule was "shocking" were about ten percent of adults tested HIV-positive. Thereupon, President Yoweri Museveni, who had taken in 1986 after years of civil war, the power of the epidemic on the national risk. source of the virus originated, it has Konde-Lule disease researchers still no answer. "At some point I stopped, I worry about it to his head." He shrugs his shoulders. AIDS is a slow disease. This makes it difficult to research. "We found that the patients were already infected two to five years before the first symptoms occurred," he says. This makes it simply impossible to prove how, when and where the people had caught the virus. Konde-Lule but suspected that the virus has spread from Tanzania. Notes provide the lifestyles of the first patients, many of the men were traders as well Migeeros Schwager. They traveled regularly to Tanzania.
The graves of these first AIDS deaths are in the banana groves behind the small brick building that houses Kasensero. There are unadorned pile of moss-grown boulders. No grave stone, no engraved name recalls the first diagnosed AIDS cases in Africa. Only the empty, dilapidated houses and the countless, hastily dug graves in the banana plantations have indicated that the disease began from here and eventually throughout the country, even spread over the whole of East Africa.
The hill, the hugs, the little village of Kasensero, rises above the shores of Lake Victoria. At dusk the glassy surface of the water shimmers in the colors of the sunset. At the landing on the beach, among hundreds of wooden boats, about a dozen parked Trucks.
About the truckers and fishermen, the virus has spread in the eighties over the whole region of time.
To date, there are the traders, fishermen and prostitutes who are in Uganda to the most risk because HIV is spread with them in all directions. Representatives of all these risk groups can meet up at the pier of Kasensero.
The small fishing village on the rotting pier has dismally. In the narrow dusty lanes between the ramshackle wooden huts, which are lined up along the beach, it smells like rotten fish heads, foul sewage and urine. Plastic bottles and banana peels are in the fine white sand. Cows pluck the few tufts of grass from the sand, towering above the waste. The roar of the young Fischer echoes along the beach. They are already in the early evening drunk. Awkward, they push their wooden boats into the water for another dangerous night on the lake. In the rush to make fun of the disease, with the current 21 percent of the population are infected Kasenseros: "Why should I use a condom," asks the 21-year-old Moses Mugisha. "If I want to enjoy a candy, I also do not suck it with the packaging," he mumbles. His buddies laugh, many of them are already HIV-positive, give them. "Plugged in we can not, yes," they shout and swing in their boats.
the virus is probably one of the East-African-highway to get Kasensero. Truck drivers from Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo are on the overland road here to stay, overnight, drink, take a whore and chug the next morning with a cargo of fresh fish back over the highway that runs through the three countries meet.
Some spend the night with Niaga, which will not name her real name. The 30-year-old with the purple streaks in the smoothed hair sits huddled in the dingy Bed in a small room with no light. When it gets dark outside, lights a candle Niaga. "Room 11" is on the rickety wooden door that leads into the courtyard of the brothel. Kasensero is notorious for its prostitutes scene. 
Niaga, mother of a young son, is positive for three years, takes two pills daily. But she tells her customers are reluctant, because: "The men pay me without a condom almost four times as much as rubber," she says. Is not that risky? She shrugs her shoulders: "Most customers are positive but already, why should they spoil the fun with a condom?" In Villages such as Kasensero, where poverty and alcoholism is greatest growth, the HIV numbers at most. However, Uganda has managed an unprecedented effort to curb the infection rate. President Museveni declared 1986 as the first president of the continent's HIV and AIDS threat to national, rather than how many of his colleagues dismiss as a conspiracy of the virus, which affects mainly white Americans. While the disease has been an issue so official, could be warned of it. Prevention began.
International donors donated billions for AIDS in Uganda, especially the United States. Start with success: The incidence of HIV infection was the beginning of the nineties has fallen by 70 percent. Uganda was a model country in the fight against AIDS. In Rakai, the HIV rate dropped to around ten percent in 2004 - 22 years after the first outbreak appeared to Uganda to win the fight against the virus.
But now Ereazer Mugisha observed repeatedly that careless handling of the risk of infection that makes him angry. The HIV-AIDS Officer of Rakai district, sits behind his desk unsorted in the offices of local governments in Rakai town and aligned on the statistics. To date, Rakai is one of the districts in Uganda, with the highest infection rates. In about six percent of medium size is nationwide. In Rakai twelve percent are HIV-positive, In some fishing villages Kasensero is the rate many times higher. In Nangoma, right on the border with Tanzania, the value is as high as 33 percent. But compared to earlier, had the situation is improving, says Mugisha. In 1988, 28 percent of adults in Rakai were infected.
that the numbers have risen again, making the officer concerned. He blames the one hand, the increase in life expectancy in HIV-infected people who can now live almost decades with the virus, he said - and it further spread as well. With a growth rate of 6.7 percent is one of Uganda also the world's fastest-growing nations. The increased infection rate was on the other hand also the fact that people have become accustomed to AIDS, as well as any other disease. "The Ugandan AIDS play down in comparison to malaria, because the HIV virus not perish miserably and the drugs are free." 
Not all AIDS patients, but have access to the medication. The four hospitals in Rakai provide only 8,000 HIV-positive, only 15 percent of those infected, with free anti-retroviral drugs that suppress the virus in the blood and delay the symptoms of AIDS. Paid for the mass treatment of the social development fund of the government, in turn, flow into the relief funds from the U.S.. After all, Mugisha already recorded this number as a success. This success is reflected in the economic statistics of the district. "The economy in our region were found in the eighties and nineties ground because we wegstarben people of working age," he says. Thanks to modern medicine, the patients may have a job and feed their families.
Over the years, the Rakai district has become a pilgrimage site of local and international virologists. U.S. researchers at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University for 20 years come regularly flown in from Baltimore to long-term studies to take in 14,000 inhabitants of the district. In cooperation with the Ugandan Virus Institute scientists have launched the Rakai Health and Science Program. The first therapeutic trials of antiretroviral drugs took place in 1996 in Rakai.
Konde-Lule Professoralso travels regularly to Rakai to where talks on cutting-edge research with colleagues from around the world.
On his desk at the Institute on the hospital grounds in Kampala is a big report - the result of a recently published study: Two years, Ugandan and American scientists, the sexual behavior of almost 6,000 men in Rakai rayed. The amazing
result: The HIV infection rate in men are pruned by 70 per cent lower than in non-circumcised. Konde-Lule points to the report: "We must focus much more in research on prevention methods, as only accessible treatment options in sight," he says and asks the same of Uganda's government. "From the healing we are still far away, but how to prevent the infection, we know that since 1982," he says something brash and raises his right index finger when he was teaching his students. The funds, watch the other researchers, are used mainly for treatment. The prevention remains relatively low.
The largest hospital in the district is located in Kalisizo, a sleepy town in Rakai. Over 2,000 HIV patients are looked after, get your pills regularly every two months rations. Under a covered porch to wait in the morning about fifty patients: children, women sit with babies in their arms, young men on wooden benches - waiting patiently, chatting. A nurse carries a balance, the number of calls by name. Judith Nakato jumps off the bench in the second row, as their name is mentioned. The 21-year-old woman in the brown and white dress has come all the way from the 180 kilometers from the capital Kampala to be in her home town the next diet pills to pick up. She stands on the scale, smiling happy because she has lost no weight, and then enters the small examination room, to tell the doctor. The doctor knows George Waggubulmi Nakato since their first positive test four years ago. At that time the young woman was pregnant. Physically, it was still her well as she had only the symptoms typical of HIV spots on the arms. "Mentally I was charged the diagnosis but very," said Nakato recalls her first encounter with Doctor Waggubulmi. The experienced doctor could reassure the expectant mother's risk of HIV transmission to the unborn baby lies with under one percent. 
Before Nakato rises again in the bus to Kampala, she tells of her three-year-old daughter, who was HIV-negative to the world and was wide awake, from their work was stressful, but they do like. Then she glanced sadly at the dusty ground. Her boyfriend and father of her children had left them "to infect Perhaps out of shame or fear itself," she mutters.
Waggubulmi After George finished his consultation, he takes stock. The patient numbers rise again in two years, he says. "Almost every day we test dozens of people are HIV-positive, but as long as drugs are sufficient, all are well supplied," he says and looks worried. He fears that next year failure to supply. For this he gives two reasons: Over the past five years, corrupt officials millions of dollars from the global AIDS fund embezzled, in the EU had paid up to 2005 € 200 million: $ 37,000,000 disappeared without a trace, according to the Ugandan Monitor newspaper in 2006. The payments were ceased. Only at the beginning of this year sent $ 4,200,000 of the funds back to Uganda to ensure that patients die because of lack of drugs.
The bulk of the money to combat AIDS is currently the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Reduction (PEPFAR), which had George W. Bush launched 2003rd Per year drugs worth 280 million dollars to Uganda are shipped. America's ambassador to Uganda in early October an increase in this budget promised, but also stressed that the United States this burden in the future could no longer bear alone. By one million to six million dollars, the PEPFAR shortened this year for the financing of HIV treatment for children. Uganda's government plans but in 2011, to increase the rate of medically treated HIV-positive people to 36,000. ie, in 2012 alone in Uganda a quarter million AIDS patients, as Judith Nakato, depending on the aid money from the U.S. - and will remain so throughout their lives, "says the doctor. The global financial crisis Waggubulmi expects that the supplies in the future be less. "So many patients die. Because they are too poor to afford the pills, "says the doctor. They cost the equivalent of seven U.S. dollars per pack. After just one week without tablets
deteriorating the condition of the patient quickly. "If people are too weak to drive 80 or 100 kilometers to the hospital, they die within a few months, mostly alone at home."Olivier Hasal squats weakened and up to the sharp bone thin on a plastic mattress with no sheets in the run-down Health Centre in Kasensero. Hasal is 50 She breathes heavily, her weary eyes with dark shadows. The few unruly hair stand on all sides.
digs out of a cloth to a tablet out. "This is the last," she says, and wrapped the little white pill again carefully. Hasal has seen her husband and two children die of AIDS. And they know that if you no one new pack from the 140-kilometer distant county concerned, it will succumb to the curse of Kasensero
- as
Edie Migeeros brother 28 years ago.
INFO BOX:
broke in 1982 from the Abmagerungskrankheit for the first time in the fishing village of Kasensero in Rakai district in southwestern Uganda. In 1984, the pathogen from the blood samples collected at Kasensero as the HIV virus can be identified. In 1996, the first patient in Rakai with antiretroviral Drugs are treated.
sub-Saharan Africa is the world most affected by the HIV epidemic region. The infection rate in Uganda is 6.4 percent, about 100,000 new infections each year. In 2008, Uganda 1.1 million people with HIV were infected. About 200,000 of them receive free medication. In Sub-Saharan Africa are infected each year, according to estimates by UNAIDS, 1.9 million people with the HIV virus. A total of 22.4 million people in Africa are HIV-positive.
0 comments:
Post a Comment