Aids: Cameroon takes up the challenge
20 July 2010
50 % of Cameroonians in need of treatment against HIV now have access to such health care. In the early 2000s only 1% had such a possibility yet in less than ten years their numbers have gone from just a few hundred to nearly 80 000.
From the beginning of the decade, a fall in the price of antiretroviral medicines started the trend. Then decentralization of access to care, set in train by the government in 2002, followed by the availability of tritherapy free-of-charge, since May 2007, have allowed this incredible progress. Commissioned by the Cameroon Ministry of Public Health, the IRD researchers and their partners in the South and the North have set up an assessment programme on this bold decentralization reform, with the support of the French Agence Nationale de Recherche sur le Sida et les hépatites virales (ANRS, France). They find that today, the health care provision for patients is achieving performances at least as good in the district services as in Yaoundé or Douala, the political and economic capitals.
