Heard & Overheard: Lawsuits, Media War Room and A Fan Club
Brief applause ran through Tuesday’s plenary session after Dr Michael Tan of the Philippines listed a set of steps he believes can help address the inequities that fuel HIV and AIDS today.
Many battles need to be waged, including the one in the Philippines around a bill to implement universal access to medicine, he said. “I will mention Pfizer here,” Tan continued, because it has filed lawsuit after lawsuit to counter this campaign. It resisted efforts to lower the prices of its drug products until a government directive was put in place to control them, he recalled.
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If there’s one place at the ICAAP 9 venue that always looks like a war room, it should be the Media Centre tucked in a corner of the huge venue. Lost cameras and recorders, sometimes unpredictable LAN connections, cramped writing spaces — these and more have not deterred journalists from penning their daily ‘offerings’ to the news-hungry public. At the end of each day, the small table allotted for laptops becomes veritable repositories of discarded press releases, brochures, flyers, conference kits and folders, computer cables, empty coffee cups and saucers.
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Politicians and governments have been faulted for falling short on a long list of issues at ICAAP, but one politician has found a small fan club of sorts here at Bali. At a session on universal access on Aug. 10, Samoa’s Deputy Prime Minister Misa Telefoni spoke out strongly in support of “the right (by vulnerable groups) not to be prejudiced against”. When her turn to speak came, United Nations Population Fund deputy executive director Purnima Mane said she wished “we had more political leaders like you”.
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ICAAP time is also creativity time. At this ICAAP, visual materials — from ‘Bog Bog’ Bali Cartoon Magazine, which features cartoons and caricatures on sexuality and HIV/AIDS from various countries, to a postcard showing a stack of colourful condoms, Indonesian comic books and condom booklets, to a popular condom brand’s glass coasters — provide perfect balance to the text-heavy press releases and documents coming out from the sessions.
(END/IPSAP-TV/09)
