Today's Date:

On Monday, January 19, at l'Hôtel de Matignon, the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, chaired a working meeting on the ESTHER programme ("Ensemble pour une Solidarité Thérapeutique Hospitalière en Réseau"¹) attended by the relevant ministers, Jean-François Mattéi, Minister for Health, the Family and the Disabled, and Pierre-André Wiltzer, Minister Delegate for Cooperation and Francophony, and by Bernard Kouchner, appointed chairman of ESTHER's governing board on 22 November 2003.

Also taking part in this meeting were the representatives (ministers or ambassadors) of the ten States from the South benefiting from the ESTHER programme and the three partner States from the North, representatives of hospital teams involved, the voluntary sector, WHO, UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as well as the ambassadors of seven countries from the North which might join ESTHER.

ESTHER is a programme of North/South hospital twinnings created in 2002 to encourage the use of anti-retroviral therapy (ARVs) for sufferers from HIV/AIDS in the South. This French initiative falls within the framework of the global policy of combating HIV/AIDS defined at the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2001 which made access to medication as important a goal for world action as prevention. It has received the UN Secretary-General's support. The Prime Minister drew attention to France's very strong commitment to the international fight against HIV/AIDS, highlighted by President Chirac's decision to triple as from 2004 France's annual contribution to the Global Fund (from €50 million to €150 million) making our country its second largest contributor.

Despite very active political and financial efforts on the part of the world community, the effective access of patients in the South to the treatments remains the priority objective. Today, 26 million out of the world's 30 million patients live in the South. Given this, the Prime Minister stressed the pertinence of the ESTHER programme which aims to increase cooperation between professionals in North and South in order to encourage the effective use of the treatments.

With Bernard Kouchner's appointment as chairman of the ESTHER governing board, decided by the government on 22 November last year, this programme is set to develop on a new scale, better tailored to the extent of the pandemic.

Consequently, and despite the current difficulties in the area of public finances, the Prime Minister has decided to increase ESTHER's budget by €5 million in the next 18 months. To the same end, he called for the mobilization of other States in the North to support and develop the ESTHER programme, suggesting that they participate in it, deeming that increasing the number of ESTHER members in the North was the most reliable way of expanding the list of countries helping the South./.

¹The French government initiated this programme ["Together in a hospital network of solidarity in care and treatment"] with other partners to promote access to care in developing countries for people living with HIV/AIDS. The ESTHER public interest group (GIP) was established in March 2002 to implement the initiative. It involves twinning hospitals in the developed countries (North) with hospitals in the developing countries (South) to promote direct cooperation in micro-health projects.