The 18th AIDS Conference
This conference took place in Vienna, Austria, from 19 to 23 July last, and called for fresh momentum and trailblazing funding options as dwindling State investment in efforts to curb this disease has become tangible
The 18th annual International AIDS Conference, which drew to a close on Friday 23 July last, ended on a bittersweet note. News that a vaginal gel containing an antiretroviral agent is ready for use provides reasons for hope. It is the first preventive measure that women can control. The perceptible decline in international funding to fight this epidemic, however, is a reason to worry. Funding for the fight against AIDS in poor countries shrank from US$ 7.7 billion in 2008 to US$ 7.6 billion in 2009, after double-digit year-on-year growth since 2002.
Global Fund Executive Director Michel Kazatchkine spoke to the 20,000 researchers, experts, association members and AIDS patients at the conference about poor countries’ needs, which total US$ 13 billion to US$ 21 billion for 2011-2013. In 2008, there were 33 million people living with AIDS around the world and more than 22 million of them were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some 400,000 children are born with AIDS in Africa every year – and one-third of them die before their first birthday –even though mother-to-child transmission has been practically eradicated everywhere else. Michel Kazatchkine said, “If we don’t have enough money to take in the new patients that will be coming to healthcare centres, we will have to say, ‘Sorry, put your name down on the list and we’ll call you as soon as we get the medicine.’ But they will be dead the day we call them.”
The Global Fund Director suggested aid from emerging countries (China and India, for example) and innovative financing inter alia from a tax on financial transactions. The bigger picture of the fight against AIDS is somewhat brighter. As UNAIDS Director Michel Sidibé told Le Monde newspaper readers in an online chat, “Over 5 million people are taking treatment. It’s the first time in 20 years that we have seen so much progress so fast. And we have seen new infections drop 17%.” New pointers are also providing reasons for optimism on the treatment front: a recent study has shown that triple therapy for HIV-positive patients halves the number of new infections, which shores up the case for using triple therapy to limit HIV transmission.
A number of States were notoriously absent in Vienna: there were no leaders from Eastern Europe, where new infections have grown by 57% in particular due to inadequate care for drug addicts. The fact that people who are forced into hiding are more exposed to this epidemic led leading lights in the fight against AIDS and research – Medicine Nobel Prize winner Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (one of the researchers who discovered HIV) and Austrian AIDS Society President Brigitte Schmied – to issue a call, shortly before the Conference, to reform the “war on drugs” and “remove the obstacles hindering more efficient and effective HIV prevention, treatment and care regimes.”
A march for Human Rights was another of this Conference’s highlights. The banner leading the procession called for, “Human Rights now more than ever.” Michel Kazatchkine’s blog entry later read, “We hadn’t felt so much momentum, passion and energy fervour since the Durban march 10 years ago.” He added, “We won’t be able to win this battle against AIDS without focusing more on Human Rights. We have to do a lot more to eradicate gender inequality and violence against women and girls, that domestic violence that hurts so many women around the world.”
