• ITAC: http://www.itacoalition.org/

“Does anyone deserve to be sentenced to death because he or she cannot access care that costs less than $2 a day?”, asked Dr Gro Harlem, the World Health Organisation Director General, at the launch of a new alliance to tackle inequality in access to treatment for HIV/AIDS (BBC News).

The International HIV Treatment Access Coalition (ITAC) — which brings together more than 50 groups, including United Nations (UN) agencies, governments and health organizations — aims to develop best practices for purchasing drugs and for implementing HIV/AIDS treatments, and, crucially, it will maintain international pressure for cheaper drugs.

The launch of ITAC in December 2002 coincided with publication of the AIDS Epidemic Update 2002, which showed that access to HIV/AIDS treatment continues to divide rich and poor nations. Worldwide, between 5 million and 6 million people are estimated to be in need of HIV treatment. In countries of low-to-middle income, only 5% of individuals with HIV/AIDS have access to treatment, compared with 100% in rich countries.

“Extending access to life-saving antiretroviral treatment is a moral, political and economic imperative,” said Dr Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, the UN joint programme on HIV/AIDS.

The UN has set the target of increasing the number of people in the developing world who receive treatment for HIV to 3 million by 2005. The hope is that ITAC will help achieve this goal. “If we continue as we are today, we will never reach the UN target,” warned Professor Jope Lange, the co-ordinator of the new coalition (The New York Times).