IT WAS 1990, in Nyon, a Swiss town a few kilometres along the lakeshore from
Geneva. Jonathan Mann had asked to do the interview there. He was about to tell
the World Health Organization that he would quit if it didn鈥檛 do more about
AIDS. Not the moment to be seen in Geneva talking to a reporter like me.
Mann had built the WHO AIDS programme from nothing. His leadership is still
cited as crucial in launching the fight against HIV in the developing world.
Without him, things would now be even worse. When governments wanted to ignore
the HIV carriers鈥攐r even lock them up鈥擬ann didn鈥檛 let them.
But something else was on his mind that day. 鈥淓ventually, there will be drugs
and vaccines for HIV,鈥� he said. 鈥淏ut they will be expensive. Most infected
people will be in poor countries. How will they get the drugs?鈥� He knew it would
be a tough problem. 鈥淲e should at least be talking with the pharmaceuticals
industry about it now.鈥�
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We didn鈥檛. The then head of the WHO, Hiroshi Nakajima, was a former drugs
company man. He didn鈥檛 even want to talk about cheap AIDS drugs. Mann left the
organisation in what was clearly, that day in Nyon, disgust.
Now Mann鈥檚 remains lie beneath the Atlantic amid the wreckage of the Swissair
flight that was taking him back to Geneva in 1998. And only now, 11 years after
that day in Nyon, is the world talking seriously about cheaper AIDS drugs for
the poor. Before the medicine finally starts flowing, thousands will suffer and
die who might not have if we鈥檇 started those talks in 1990.
And as I watch that happening, I find there鈥檚 another old conversation I
can鈥檛 get out of my mind. It took place two years before my encounter with Mann,
at the Beijing flat of a Western friend. He is gay and so were many of the
people I met there. The Chinese men told heart-wrenching tales of life in a
society where homosexuality officially does not exist. Many worked in hotels to
meet Western gays. Few knew about safe sex. The Westerners told of being pursued
by desperate Chinese men.
All that meant HIV had to be entering the population鈥攁nd spreading. The
Chinese all knew colleagues who had suddenly disappeared. And they all expected
to marry.
Now, after years of denial, China finally admits to at least 600,000 HIV
carriers. But the official talk is mostly of drug addicts and border regions.
There is little recognition even of the thousands infected selling their blood,
while the authorities try to silence the doctors who are screaming about it. Gay
men get no mention at all.
So once again, people will suffer and die because
the powerful do not wish to talk about what an ordinary reporter knew more than
a decade ago. We try to tell them. But that just doesn鈥檛 seem to be enough.
I wonder why.