AIDS TREATMENT NEWS Developing International Treatment Newsletter

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS has begun a collaborative project with
the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission to
distribute an international edition of the newsletter to
communities that are not now receiving treatment information.

The international edition will be translated into multiple
languages and distributed free to grassroots organizations, which
would then distribute the newsletters to people with AIDS,
doctors, health care providers and researchers. In its first
year, a pilot project would target countries with the highest
AIDS caseload: Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Uganda, Zaire,
Tanzania, Kenya, India, Poland and Rumania.

During this first phase, the newsletter staff will seek out
people working in grassroots AIDS organizations to survey the
treatment information needs in their communities. Meanwhile, a
quarterly version of AIDS TREATMENT NEWS will be distributed to
meet the immediate need for information. As we learn more about
each community, we will change the international edition to
better reflect those needs.

During the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in the United
States, people with AIDS took pioneering action to inform
themselves and get involved in their own treatment decisions.
AIDS TREATMENT NEWS grew out of and helped create that movement.
Yet information is not reaching people throughout the world,
despite the global nature of the AIDS pandemic. "In the first
decade of response to AIDS, remarkable successes in some
communities contrast dramatically with a growing sense of
collective, massive global failure," writes Jonathan Mann and
others, in AIDS in the World 1992.

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS periodically receives requests from
people in other countries who write about the desperate need for
treatment information. "We are studying new drugs for AIDS
treatment and (are) badly in need of the information on this
field," a researcher from China wrote. "By chance I read an
issue of AIDS TREATMENT NEWS edited by you, and like it very
much. Would you please send us all sample issues on Compound Q."

Preliminary investigation has shown that although
representatives from countries all over the world attend the
International Conference on AIDS, vital information does not
trickle down to grassroots organizations and people with AIDS.
Also, organizations in Europe currently take AIDS TREATMENT NEWS
and translate it into German and Dutch for European distribution,
but organizations in the developing world can seldom afford
translation and distribution costs.

The international edition staff met recently with eight
doctors from seven countries who are visiting scholars at the
Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of
California in San Francisco. The doctors were supportive of the
international edition and offered specific advice about what kind
of information their communities need.

In Brazil, one doctor said, clinicians do not have access to
laboratory work to determine the T-cell counts of their patients.
Yet drugs produced by U. S. and European pharmaceutical companies
are prescribed on the basis of those counts. "When do we begin
AZT and why? When do we start PCP prophylaxis?"

The doctors said that their communities would be interested
in breakthroughs in medicine not yet available in their
communities as well as information that would be immediately
useful, such as therapies based on nutrition, which can be an
affordable treatment.

By collaborating with the International Gay & Lesbian Human
Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the project combines the expertise of
producing an AIDS treatment newsletter with the experience of
IGLHRC, which has worked for two years at international
organizing and distribution of HIV prevention materials
internationally.

What AIDS TREATMENT NEWS needs most is help in finding
foundations or other organizations who could fund international
distribution of treatment information. If you could help us with
this project, contact Nancy Solomon at AIDS TREATMENT NEWS
(415/255-4659 (fax); or P. O. Box 411256, San Francisco, CA
94141).