Betraying Africa"s HIV/Aids Priorities by Associated Press / Reuters / Africa Action 12:57am 1st Jun, 2006   Since the virus discovery, more than 60-million people have been infected, 25-million have already died, and upwards of 40-million are currently living with HIV/AIDS.    June 3, 2006    Nations resist new financial commitments on AIDS, by Evelyn Leopold. (Reuters)    A major U.N. meeting on AIDS strategy on Friday fell short of concrete financial commitments but recognized the growing spread of the disease among women and their right to protect themselves.    Friday''s session, the last day of a three-day meeting, brought together heads of state, prime ministers and health officials from 151 countries on how to care for 40 million infected people over the next decade. 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981 and 8,000 die each day of the disease. Women in Africa have surpassed men in contracting the disease.    The final declaration, many activists said, was more positive than they had predicted. Muslim countries, including Iraq, Egypt and Pakistan, at one point resisted commitments on the rights of women or girls.    Still, some 70 groups among the 800 attending denounced the declaration as "pathetically weak" on financial goals and rights for girls under 18, many of them in forced marriages.    While the declaration is non-binding, it serves as a basis for many governmental programs and spurs aggressive lobbying by advocacy groups.    The document says $23 billion will be needed annually by 2010 to fight AIDS, more than double the $8.3 billion spent in 2005. Nations agreed to search for additional resources to ensure universal access to treatment by 2010.    But delegations did not commit themselves to a timetable for raising the funds as they did in 2001 when the financial target was met.    The United States led those objecting to international financial goals, although Washington, the largest spender on AIDS prevention and treatment in the developing world, has set its own goals.    Squeamishness over sex was evident this year as in 2001, with Islamic groups and conservative Roman Catholic countries using the term "vulnerable groups" rather than referring to prostitutes, homosexuals or drug users as people who had to be reached to prevent the spread of the disease.    "Leadership means finding ways to reach out to all groups -- whether young people, sex workers, injecting drug users or men who have sex with men," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the conference several times throughout the week.    First lady Laura Bush told the U.N. General Assembly that "every country has an obligation to educate its citizens" on how AIDS in transmitted. She called on countries to improve literacy so people could make better choices.    "I wish we could have been a bit more frank in our document about telling the truth," Hilary Benn, Britain''s international development secretary, told the conference.    "Abstinence is fine for those who are able to abstain, but human beings like to have sex and they should not die because they do have sex," he said.    Yet the document, in addition to abstinence, advocated male and female condoms and "harm reduction" efforts related to drug use, a euphemism for needle exchange programs for addicts.    The declaration also called for sex education, reproductive health services and condemned "abuse, rape and other forms of sexual violence" as well as trafficking in women and girls."    "It seems that the world governments -- including the most conservative countries -- have finally woken up to the fact that young people must have access to comprehensive sex education," said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women''s Health Coalition.    U.N. experts say the number of people living with HIV continues to rise. Most Africans, some two-thirds of the 40 million infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, die within 10 years due poor health care and lack of food.    May 31, 2006    Betraying Africa"s HIV/Aids Priorities, by Ann-Louise Colgan. (AfricaAction)    This week, world leaders will gather at the United Nations (UN) in New York to review commitments made five years ago in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In recent weeks, African governments and civil society groups have conducted similar reviews of international pledges and targets on HIV/AIDS. The results are grim. Promises of an urgent and coordinated response to this pandemic have been disregarded, and Africa continues to bear the brunt of the global failure to defeat HIV/AIDS.    It"s not just that African efforts to combat HIV/AIDS are hindered by the continent"s poverty. Nor is it only that the U.S. and other rich countries have failed to contribute sufficient resources to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and other impoverished regions, though this is still a large part of the problem: a much greater investment in Africa"s health care infrastructure and HIV/AIDS initiatives is possible, and indeed it is a prerequisite to turning the tide of this global pandemic.    But beyond the question of funding, it is increasingly clear that the orientation of U.S. policies on HIV/AIDS, in particular, is at odds with African priorities in combating this pandemic. The priorities articulated by international health experts, and by many African governments and civil society groups in the fight against HIV/AIDS, are actually being undermined by current U.S. policies, which hinder an effective response on the front lines of this devastating crisis.    Africa is home to more than 25 million of the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and most of those living with HIV/AIDS on the continent are women, but U.S. policies fail to address the needs and vulnerabilities of African women and girls. The "gag rule" denies U.S. funding for many essential reproductive health programs across the continent if they also conduct or provide information on safe abortions as part of their work.    When it comes to HIV prevention, the heavy U.S. focus on abstinence-only programs undermines a more comprehensive strategy and fails to support the needs of women who remain vulnerable even when they stay faithful to one partner. Promoting women"s sexual and reproductive rights, and empowering women to make their own decisions, are central elements to defeating HIV/AIDS, but U.S. policies fail to support these priorities for African women and girls.    While there has been a small improvement in expanding access to HIV treatment in Africa in recent years, only a fraction of those living with HIV/AIDS on the continent now have access to life-saving anti-retroviral therapies. Treatment is key in the fight against HIV/AIDS, but U.S. policies are hindering efforts to expand the delivery of low cost, effective generic equivalents of HIV/AIDS drugs. U.S. programs still rely heavily on expensive brand-name treatments, which often cost two to three times as much, and therefore reach only a portion of potential beneficiaries.    Five years ago, when the UN last held a special session on HIV/AIDS, one of the concrete outcomes of that meeting was the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. This multilateral vehicle has mounted a successful and comprehensive response to HIV/AIDS in more than 130 countries, funding effective prevention, treatment and care programs. But the failure of the U.S. and other rich countries to provide adequate support to the Global Fund has left it facing chronic funding shortfalls and unable to scale up its programs to meet the needs on the ground.    Rather than supporting the Global Fund, the U.S. channels most of its HIV/AIDS funding through its own unilateral program, announced by the President three years ago. This directs funding primarily to a dozen African countries, or less than a quarter of the continent. Such a selective U.S. policy approach not only ignores the rest of the African continent, which is also being devastated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic; it precludes the more coherent and comprehensive response required to defeat this public health crisis.    African efforts to confront HIV/AIDS are also still handicapped by the continent"s massive debt burden, and by the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which constrain spending on health care in many African countries. The U.S. is the single largest shareholder and the most powerful voice in these financial institutions.    Twenty-five years into this unprecedented pandemic, HIV/AIDS continues to kill millions of people each year - especially in Africa - not because this is an invincible disease, but because the international community has not done what"s needed to stop it. Until there is a new sense of urgency, and a shift in U.S. policies that seek to respond to this crisis, HIV/AIDS will remain a permanent and deadly feature on the international landscape, and Africa will remain at "ground zero" of this global pandemic.    (Ann-Louise Colgan is Acting Co-Executive Director of Africa Action, the oldest Africa advocacy organization in the United States).    May 30, 2006    Anti-AIDS drive still falling short, by Irwin Arieff. (Reuters)    Twenty-five years after AIDS was first recognized, the world is still falling short in its battle against the disease with severe gaps in prevention and treatment, the United Nations said on Tuesday.    "Despite some notable achievements, the response to the AIDS epidemic to date has been nowhere near adequate," said UNAIDS, the U.N. agency that coordinates the global campaign against the pandemic.    Since doctors first described the disease in June 1981, AIDS and the HIV virus that causes it have spread relentlessly from a few widely scattered hot spots to virtually every country in the world, infecting 65 million people and killing 25 million, UNAIDS said in a 630-page report.    Researchers have produced "mountains of evidence" about how to prevent and treat this disease, said the report, based on data gathered from 126 countries since December 2005.    But anti-AIDS initiatives and their results vary widely from country to country, and many are falling short of the benchmarks set in a landmark high-level U.N. General Assembly session in 2001, UNAIDS said.    "Because this pandemic and its toll cannot be reversed in the short term, we need to sustain a full-scale response for the next decades," it said on the eve of a follow-up session opening on Wednesday in New York.    Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, told a news conference he expected long-term commitments at this week"s meeting, noting that spending on AIDS had reached its target for 2005 with expenditures of $8.3 billion compared to $1.6 billion in 2001.    He said it was time to move beyond short-term crisis management and hoped for $20 billion annually by 2010.    Among successes since the last special session, the report cited evidence that more people are using condoms, having fewer sex partners and starting sexual activity later in life.    The global AIDS incidence rate is believed to have peaked in the late 1990s. About 1.3 million people in the developing world are now on life-extending antiretroviral medicines, which saved about 300,000 lives last year alone.    Still, some 4.1 million people were newly infected and 2.8 million died in 2005. There were 4.9 million new infections and 3.1 million deaths in 2004.    Fewer than half of young people were knowledgeable about AIDS. Among those injecting illegal drugs or having homosexual sex, few received preventive services last year.    The global supply of condoms was less than 50 percent of what was needed, and antiretroviral drugs, while more widely available, remained costly and hard to get.    Ignored in many countries are prostitutes, said Thoraya Obeid, the Saudi Arabian executive director of the U.N. Population Fund. She said they also had the right to prevention and treatment, especially since many were poor women or girls, sold into prostitution and victims of violence.    However, a final statement by governments at the conference this week is not expected to refer to prostitutes, drug users or homosexuals, due to objections from Islamic nations, some Catholic countries and the United States which fear that merely mentioning these groups would endorse their behavior.    Infected individuals still suffer from ostracism and discrimination, while the vast majority of the world"s 40 million infected people have never been tested for HIV and are unaware of their status, the report said.    While $8.9 billion is expected to be available in 2006 to combat AIDS in developing countries, $14.9 billion will be needed, UNAIDS said. By 2008, it predicted, $22.1 billion would be needed, including $11.4 billion for prevention plans alone.    The report called for more and better-targeted education and prevention strategies, more treatment opportunities, and more drug research, particularly on drugs for children, whose needs "have been largely left out of the research agenda."    May 30, 2006    India now tops world in number of HIV/AIDS cases, by Ramola Talwar Badam. (Associated Press)    Outside, women stand with their hands on their hips, trying to catch the eye of any passing man in the Kamathipura red-light district, where about half of Bombay"s 10,000 prostitutes work.    Shehnaz Begum knows the place well. She spent 10 years on its streets, fleeing only when the prospect of AIDS grew too terrifying.    For years, Indian health activists and officials argued about the number of people infected with the AIDS virus — debating whether the situation was stabilizing in India or about to explode.    On Tuesday, UNAIDS issued a report saying India has world"s largest number of people living with HIV. With an estimated 5.7 million infections, the country has surpassed South Africa"s 5.5 million.    The 630-page report documents countries" progress and failures, and projects what must happen to keep some regions from experiencing disaster. The agency report was released a day ahead of a high-level meeting on AIDS in New York, and a week prior to the 25th anniversary of the first documented AIDS cases on June 5, 1981.    "I think we will see a further globalization of the epidemic spreading to every single corner of the planet," UNAIDS head Peter Piot told The Associated Press in an interview.    Nearly 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.    The epidemic still remains at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita rates continue to climb in several countries. A third of adults were infected in Swaziland in 2005. By comparison, India"s per capita rate is low, at 0.9% of its 1.02 billion people.    Piot said one of the report"s most disturbing findings was how few babies are being protected against infection. Only 9% of pregnant women in poor countries are receiving services, such as access to drugs, to help prevent mother-to-child transmission, despite a UNAIDS goal of 80% coverage.    Women"s vulnerability to the disease continues to increase, with more than 17 million women infected worldwide — nearly half the global total — and more than three-quarters of them living in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.    In India, there are signs of hope despite the huge numbers of infections.    Intensive AIDS prevention efforts among prostitutes and the men who frequent them have pushed down HIV infections dramatically in four south Indian states, according to a recent University of Toronto study.    The study found a 35% drop in HIV among people aged 15-24 years because of efforts by authorities and non-governmental groups to educate sex workers. Places like Kamathipura are now dotted with posters, street theater performances and educators, all offering information about AIDS and HIV. Bombay is in Maharashtra state, one of the four states where the study found the decline.    "HIV remains a huge problem in India," said Rajesh Kumar, an author of the study. "We"re not saying the epidemic is under control yet — we are saying that prevention efforts with high-risk groups thus far seem to be having an effect."    Intensive education appears to have driven down infection rates, but many people are still at risk, Merchant said. While many "core transmitters" — such as truckers and prostitutes — have been reached, the "bridge" population — such as truckers" wives — have received little attention, she said.    "At least 80% of sex workers use condoms compared to the 1990s when they hadn"t even heard of condoms," she said. Many in the other groups, though, still "think this is a disease other people get."    Click on the link below to access the UNAIDS Report. Visit the related web page
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