ZAMBIA

AIDS: LIVE AND LET DIE?
Insight News TV

REPORTER: JONATHAN MILLER

A 26 minute film
The world faces a stark choice: let the twenty-two million Africans already infected with AIDS die or try to save lives by providing access to expensive anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. The problem is not just the cost. As Insight News has established, making ARVs widely available risks the spread of lethal, drug-resistant strains of HIV.
 

Veronica Mwansa is 14 and dying of AIDS. When she was six she was gang raped. She became sick at eight. Her parents are HIV+ too. Today Veronica is emaciated and in continuous pain - every day she feels worse. This extraordinary film shows why, despite the suffering of AIDS patients in developing countries there is serious concern that giving them life-saving ARV drugs could unleash a catastrophe.
Every day AIDS kills more than 200 Zambians. Within ten years, one fifth of the population will have been wiped out. On the dusty hills around Lusaka are the mass graves of a viral genocide: cemeteries consuming fresh tracts of land every week. Ninety per cent of the deaths are AIDS related. "Africans are dying like grasshoppers" as one AIDS patient puts it, while in the rich world they live thanks to ARV drugs.

Insight News TV | Home