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Clinton to help expand AIDS prevention programme in India
Feb 22, 2006, 16:11, Reviewed by: Dr. Priya Saxena
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Clinton said he was most worried about the fact that there were approximately five million new infections worldwide last year.
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By IANS,
Former US president Bill Clinton plans to expand the coverage of AIDS prevention programmes in India through more education, preventive measures and tests.
"A year from now, instead of a million people getting the medication, we should have three million or more," Clinton told CNN news channel in an interview.
The former US president had Sunday announced a William J. Clinton Foundation-funded plan to train Indian nurses in AIDS care.
He told CNN: "A year from now, we should have far more people (working on AIDS prevention and care), like the nurses we are talking about here.
"And that means that you have more education, prevention and testing. I hope a year from now it would have drastically increased by millions, tens of millions the number of people getting tested."
Clinton said he was most worried about the fact that there were approximately five million new infections worldwide last year. "And that primarily is because 90 percent of the people who are infected don't know it."
He expressed the hope that the rate of AIDS deaths would be reversed.
"It will take a little while once you do all three things. Then that 8,000 a day (deaths) will go down. Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it, I saw the death rate in Brazil drop 80 percent in two years.
"In my first term, we dropped the death rate in America by 80 percent."
Clinton has over the years managed to convince pharmaceutical companies to bring down the prices of drugs to fight AIDS.
Asked how he managed that, he said: "We knew that the reason these drugs were priced as they were, as I was told, relatively speaking, (was) a low volume, high profit margin business where the buyers were often poor countries where payment was often delayed and sometimes uncertain.
"So we said that we want you to go to a high volume, low profit margin business with prompt and certain payments. That's what got the prices down."
India has an estimated 5.1 HIV/AIDS patients, second only to South Africa. 
- Indo-Asian News Service
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