Drastic need for more AIDS health workers -meeting

TORONTO, Aug 19 (Reuters) Drastic measures are needed to make sure there are enough health care workers to help treat and prevent HIV in Africa, where 25 million patients with the virus now live, said the World Health Organisation.

Lifesaving drugs for AIDS are available and more affordable, big donors are placing renewed emphasis on prevention, but millions will continue to die without health care workers and facilities to deliver them, said WHO Acting Director-General Dr Anders Nordstrom yesterday.

''No improvement in financing or medical products can make a lasting difference in people's lives until the crisis in the health workforce is solved,'' Nordstrom said in remarks wrapping up the weeklong 16th International AIDS conference.

''The situation calls for drastic measures.'' Nixon Niyonzima, a third-year medical student at Makerere Medical School in Kampala, Uganda, said he is already seeing firsthand what happens to patients when there are no trained doctors or nurses.

''You watch them as they die because you don't have the facilities. You don't have the equipment. It's frustrating,'' Niyonzima said at a news conference.

In Uganda, he said, only two medical schools train doctors, and many of them emigrate. He does not blame them. ''You have better facilities. You have better pay,'' he said.

Niyonzima helped found a group called Students for Equity in Health Care, and took part in a program that sends medical students to rural areas to work directly with patients and help fill the gap, at least temporarily.

Hetherwick Ntaba, political adviser to Malawi's president, said only 10 per cent of lots for physicians are filled in his country, although 10 people die every hour of AIDS.

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