Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/in-rwanda-u-s-backed-program-improves-access-to-aids-drugs Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript A U.S. program to curb AIDS in Africa is having success providing antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients in Rwanda -- particularly pregnant women and newborns. Health correspondent Susan Dentzer begins a series of reports examining the impact of the American effort. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. SUSAN DENTZER, NewsHour Health Correspondent: It's often hard to comprehend the toll that HIV-AIDS has taken here in this beautiful land of the legendary 1,000 hills. About 4 percent of the adult population here in Rwanda is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That's added untold misery in a poor country, where per capita income is just $1,600 a year.Before the widespread use of antiretroviral drugs, or ARVs, thousands with HIV were dying. But now all of that has changed, to the benefit of people like Fatumah Nyirasafari, a 24-year-old Muslim woman with HIV. We interviewed her outside the hospital where she gets her HIV treatment. FATUMAH NYIRASAFARI, HIV-Positive Rwandan (through translator): I learned I was infected in 2001 after the death of my first husband. I started on antiretroviral treatment. I took it for eight months. Then I had my first child with my second husband. SUSAN DENTZER: Thanks in part to drug treatment she underwent while pregnant, her now year-old son was born HIV-free. As is the case with tens of thousands of Rwandais with HIV, Nyirasafari's treatment is paid for by U.S. taxpayers. FATUMAH NYIRASAFARI (through translator): I know that it is funded by the American government, and we are very, very happy that they managed to bring that support to us. With the treatment, we are healthy. We are living like any ordinary person, and we are very, very grateful for that support.GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States: Tonight I propose the emergency plan for AIDS relief, a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa. SUSAN DENTZER: The program that pays for Nyirasafari's treatment, proposed by President Bush in 2003, is the U.S. Global AIDS Initiative. It's often called PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.Congress ultimately voted to spend $15 billion on the five-year effort to fight HIV in roughly 120 countries. The goal by 2008 was to get 7 million people on antiretroviral drugs, prevent 10 million new infections, and provide care for 2 million orphans and other AIDS-affected people.From the start, countless concerns were raised that the program was too costly; or, by contrast, that the U.S. wasn't spending enough on it; that health systems in poor nations could never deliver the care; that Africans in particular couldn't follow complex treatment regimens; that high-cost anti-AIDS drugs would be stolen or diverted.But now, four years after the program got going, most of these concerns have been laid to rest, says Ambassador Mark Dybul. He's the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. MARK DYBUL, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator: When President Bush started this, when he announced this, 50,000 people — 50,000 people — in all of sub-Saharan Africa were receiving antiretroviral therapy. Through last September, we supported treatment for 1.1 million people.And that, I think, is the greatest thing about PEPFAR. It's hope. It's creating hope where there was no hope.