- No medical care for family members other than employees and their spouses - Out-of-pocket costs for workers for the purchase of medicines will prove to be an unsurmountable barrier to access for most of them - No commitment to using the least costly medicines( generics instead of brand-name drugs) - No promise to sustain the [...]
- Coca-Cola is the most important private sector employer in Africa : it employs 100 000 people to distribute Coca-Cola products in all African countries, except two. - In 2001 Coca-Cola's turnover in Africa reached $621 million and represented the highest growth rate of the company's sales in the world. The same year AIDS killed more [...]
On October 16 and 17 protest actions against Coca-Cola will take place in many countries to denounce Coca-Cola's refusal to pay for the treatment of its employees. Demonstrations are planned in South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Morocco and other African countries as well as in Thailand, Canada, Portugal, Japan, Norway, India, Great Britain and the United [...]
Five years ago, when we saw our bodies were changing, we felt that the problem was hormonal. But how women perceived their bodies was the last thing doctors were concerned with at that time, and when we talked to them about these changes, they would say to us: «Go on a diet, you women, you love diets !» Today, people talk about lipodystrophia.
When you suck a cock without a condom, you're taking a risk. Likewise when you lick a cunt without a dental dam. That these risks are slight changes nothing; they exist, and the only way to avoid them is to use condoms or dental dams. There is no vaccine, nor any other means of protection.
In an interview with Le Monde on May 30 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy, France's recently appointed «Minister of Internal Affairs, National Security and Civil Liberties», declared: «I wasn't given this job to analyze the situation. I'm here to stop violence and provide French people with the most important of liberties: safety.» Whose safety is he talking about? Probably not ours, which has for long been threatened everyday physically by an arsenal of laws that either target us or forget us. Threatened by the recent resurgence of repressive ideologies since April 21. By the hunting down of foreigners, the ban on drugs, the violence of the penitentiary system. By the insults - racist, sexist, homophobic - that go unpunished. By the scorn shown towards our protest that AIDS is an emergency. For us, as a minority group, Sarkozy's «safety» means nothing more than danger.
Criminalization opposes any effective policy of HIV prevention and practice of responsibility. But that's not all.
France does not grant the right of asylum to homosexuals who are prosecuted in their own countries, nor does it condemn such persecutions.
Fighting AIDS means fighting the discrimination and social problems faced by HIV-positive people, which prevent them from getting the right medical treatment.
The anti-HIV drugs we daily take came on the market long ago : in 1987 for AZT, and in 1996 for the protease inhibitors. The laboratories undertook the 3 necessary tests before the drugs were allowed to be distributed: phase 1, which concerns biological and clinical resistance, toxicity and dosage; phase 2 - medical efficacy and optimal dosage; and phase 3 - often a comparative study of the effective results of the drugs, including side effects... At the end of this third study permission to distribute the drugs is granted.
