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Bono-O'Neill Visit Ugandan AIDS Clinic

Aired May 28, 2002 - 11:16   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KRIS OSBORN, CNN ANCHOR: Rock star Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill visited an AIDS clinic in Uganda, the latest stop on their African tour. They came away, though, with very different opinions on Uganda's battle against AIDS.

CNN's Daryn Kagan, you may have heard and seen by now, is traveling with the pair. She has this report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Inside this fence, the fight against AIDS begins and ends.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The moment they told me that You're HIV positive, I saw that it was not very easy. I knew that -- I didn't know how I'm going to cope so that -- as if it's AIDS, but then I got my (UNINTELLIGIBLE), and they referred me to this organization.

KAGAN: For 15 years, the Taso Clinic in Kampala, Uganda, has been counseling and testing patients stricken with the deadly disease.

DR. CLAUDE KAZOSI, TASO CLINIC: During the HIV AIDS (UNINTELLIGIBLE) is a very hard thing. It's not easy. I mean, looking at patients who are very sick and -- that in itself is very hard.

KAGAN (on camera): This Taso Clinic sees as many as 140 patients in a single day. And this is where U.S. tax dollars go. The clinic runs on an annual budget of $4 million. And that might seem like a lot of money to some, but really, it's only enough to treat the very sick patients. So each day, doctors must make the difficult decision: who gets drugs and who doesn't.

(voice-over): Basically, there's no money for antiretroviral drugs, the kind that protect HIV patients from infection and help sustain their immune levels.

(on camera): And the goal, the dream would be to have enough money to have enough to pay for those drugs plus the even sicker people as well.

KAZOSI: Exactly. That would be our dream. Because, I mean, we're seeing quite a lot of patients whose immunities clinically are much lower than 200. But because we cannot afford the cost of the drugs...

KAGAN (voice-over): Dahila (ph) is HIV positive and the mother of two children, 10 and 8. Her kids are HIV negative. With help from the Taso Clinic, she has survived 14 years, but she still worries about the future and her children.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): She worries that she'll leave them and she dies and leaves them when they are still young. And that she worries if she hasn't planned for them, and she does.

KAGAN: For now, Dahila (ph) is a success story. And some say Uganda is too. Some figures point out that this country has had a remarkable drop in the AIDS infection rate: from 30 percent in the late '80s to 6 percent now. These people credit government leadership and a more open environment to battle their disease.

We rode away from Taso Clinic with the men who we're following across Africa: U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and rock star Bono. They have their own perspective on the progress against AIDS in Uganda.

PAUL O'NEILL, TREASURY SECRETARY: The thing you've got to be careful about with statistics is statistics can mislead you. Part of the reason the percentage has gone down is because the population has gone up. There are more people in this society, so the fraction, without big increments of additional people, the percentage of the population that has HIV is going down.

BONO, U2 LEAD SINGER/ACTIVIST: But Daryn is right in that that they have made huge progress.

O'NEILL: They have made progress, but I think we should be careful not to celebrate too soon.

BONO: And I'm inspired by having a treasury secretary who gets quite angry when he's told something is impossible. I really like that. And even though we fight and we disagree on bits and pieces of policy and stuff like that, that is the kind of attitude it's going to take when we go home.

KAGAN: In Kampala, Uganda, Daryn Kagan, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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