|
An agreement between Brazil and the Caribbean countries provides for the transfer of technology to manufacture drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, as well as partnerships in programs to prevent the disease.
Brazil currently produces eight of the 16 medications that form the AIDS cocktail. Brazil will also donate 500 treatments to HIV carriers in Caribbean countries.
These steps are part of a group of measures agreed upon by the Brazilian government and representatives of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) who visited Brazil last week.
The measures will not take effect immediately, but they are expected to be implemented by the end of 2005, affirms the deputy director of the Ministry of Health's STD/AIDS program, Ricardo Marins.
He explains that the agreements still need to be given a definite shape by the Brazilian government and the Caricom. Nevertheless, he underscores the necessity of intensifying partnerships in AIDS treatment and prevention.
"After Africa, the Caribbean is the region with the largest number of individuals infected by the HIV virus. In some countries 5-7% of the population are bearers of the AIDS virus."
The donation of medications to treat 500 HIV patients, according to Marins, will be directed towards nine countries - small islands - that would be overtaxed if they had to buy the drugs that form the anti-retroviral cocktail.
Among the measures that were announced, the secretary of the Caricom, Danzel Douglas, mentions training courses to be administered by Brazilian professionals in hospitals in the Caribbean countries.
Another partnership between Brazil and the Caribbean community will provide for an exchange of information about how to deal with AIDS cases in the workplace, Douglas points out.
The Caricom secretary also recalls the partnership between Brazil and Guyana to reinforce the area of quality control in an anti-retroviral factory in Guyana. In Surinam, Douglas points to the effort developed to prevent AIDS.
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.