U.S. says blood safety new Africa AIDS challenge

By Shapi Shacinda

LUSAKA (Reuters) - Unsafe blood transfusions and contaminated syringes should be a new focus in the fight against AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the world's highest HIV infection rates, the top U.S. AIDS official said on Wednesday.

Dr. Mark Dybul, the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, said evidence suggested sexual transmission of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, was stabilizing in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to education programs.

But he said a new task was to stop infections through blood transfusion -- difficult for poor countries saddled with both decrepit medical facilities and HIV infection rates reaching as high as 40 percent in some areas.

"The best treatment for HIV/AIDS is to prevent people from getting it and that's why we need this comprehensive response," Dybul told reporters. "We also need to work on non-sexual transmission."

Dybul, in Zambia for a four-day visit to assess HIV/AIDS programs in the southern African country, said Washington would give Zambia a total of $570 million in the four years to 2007 to fight the pandemic.

One in five of Zambia's 10 million people has either HIV infection or has progressed to AIDS, according to official estimates.

Much of the U.S. money goes to the Maina Soko military hospital in Lusaka, one of Zambia's best facilities, which is only open to military personnel and their families.

Dybul toured its HIV clinic and laboratories fitted with equipment to screen blood for HIV -- a relative rarity in Zambian hospitals, where doctors often have to boil syringes for re-use on other patients and medicines, including HIV drugs, are in short supply.

Dybul urged African countries to build on programs that urge sexual abstinence and condom use and address non-sexual HIV transmission, in hospitals and from mother to child.

"I think sub-Saharan (Africa) has seen good progress," he said. "Young men and women are changing their behavior...we are seeing rapid expansions of country programs. A lot more needs to be done, but people of Zambia and Sub-Saharan Africa are making (progress)," he added.