Africa: World Backtracks on HIV Treatment. 21/5/10

A few power brokers and politicians who claim AIDS receives too much money seem intent on bringing to an end this remarkable effort

Washington, DC — "Around the world thousands of doctors, nurses, legislators, and activists helped make treatment scale-up possible. Now a few power brokers and politicians who claim AIDS receives too much money seem intent on bringing to an end this remarkable effort, in effect saying to millions of people: drop dead. Without treatment, this is certainly their fate." - Gregg Gonsalves, International Treatment Preparedness Coalition

Uganda's Peter Mugenyi, who testified before the U.S. Congress earlier this year about the devastating effect of cutbacks in U.S. AIDS funding commitments on patients in Uganda (Article here), provides the foreword for the latest report from the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, which documents early warning signs of declining international and national commitment to universal access to treatment for AIDS, in Kenya, Malawi, and Swaziland as well as 3 non-African countries (India, Latvia, and Venezuela).

The report is the latest documentation of the threat of "AIDS fatigue," which is allowing governments in rich countries to backtrack on commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and to the U.S. bilateral PEPFAR Program. Despite renewed efforts to call attention to the danger, and new commitments in key countries such as South Africa, the odds of providing universal access by the end of this year have reached the vanishing point. Today some 4 million people of the approximately 10 million who need AIDS treatment worldwide are receiving it, a dramatic advance from a decade again when most assumed that treatment for those in poor countries was impossible. But at least 6 million are not being treated (and under new WHO treatment guidelines the number needing treatment may increase by as much as 4 million more). The danger is that the global effort will falter rather than building on its successes.