Health and Science

BANGKOK (AlertNet) – It was an early Monday evening and the red light district in Thailand’s capital was already heaving -- full of locals and foreigners drinking sundowner cocktails and enjoying the flesh parading before their eyes. Street vendors were selling food, clothes, souvenirs and Valentine’s Day gifts.

They probably weren’t expecting a group of (mainly) fuchsia-clad men in towering heels, bouffant hairdos and sashes advocating safe sex, but that’s exactly what they got.

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“I can’t see anything,” I hear a fellow visitor say in the darkened exhibition room of a London gallery.

I look at one of the photos on the wall and agree – nearly all I can make out is a foot, a white sheet and a white glove against a black background.

It is only when I shine a portable solar lamp – provided by sustainable-energy charity Ashden, which organised the exhibition – that I make out in the photo the vague shape of a woman’s legs and soiling on the sheets.

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Seth Berkley, M.D., is the CEO of the GAVI Alliance and a global advocate for the power of vaccines. He is an epidemiologist and medical doctor by training. The opinions expressed are his own.

I am in Davos, Switzerland, attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) for the seventh time, representing GAVI, which was born here in 2000, and which like Davos brings together leaders from many fields, in the case of GAVI to save children’s lives and protect people’s health through immunisation. 

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Natasha F. Bilimoria is president of Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The opinions expressed are her own.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — the world’s most powerful tool for improving health — at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

As I participate in the global health events at this year’s forum in Davos, I can’t help but think of a different scene playing out almost 3,000 miles away in Accra, Ghana, where women with HIV are keeping appointments at Global Fund-supported clinics, talking to health care providers, and getting the treatment they need to protect their newborn babies, care for their families and lead healthy, productive lives.   

During a recent visit to the TEMA and Korel Bu Teaching Hospitals in Accra, I had the honor of meeting some of these women living with HIV, who spoke with pride about their ability to work to support their families and be a part of their communities — and the joy of being alive to watch their children grown and learn.

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Anne Marson is communications manager at the Friends of the Global Fight Against Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Any opinions expressed are her own.

The Global Fund, the world’s largest and most powerful global health financier, is celebrating its 10^th anniversary this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

To mark this important milestone, Christoph Benn, director of External Relations and Partnerships for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who worked as a doctor in Tanzania, speaks about the incredible advances made there and shares his vision for global efforts to fight HIV and AIDS.

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“Country ownership” has become a popular term used in discussions about the future of U.S. foreign assistance. But its definition shifts depending on who you’re talking to. InterAction’s just released policy paper, “Country Ownership: Moving from Rhetoric to Action,” provides a clear and easy to understand definition that all who care about international development should consider using.  

Defined in the paper as “the full and effective participation of a country’s population—including government, civil society and the private sector—in conceptualizing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating development policies, and programs,” country ownership is a partnership approach to development assistance. It empowers and supports countries and their citizens to take responsibility for their own development, using local systems and resources to create new opportunities and change in their communities, while becoming less reliant on foreign aid.   

It’s not just NGOs who believe in country ownership. The Obama administration has become attached to the concept, promoting it in development policies such as the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review and initiatives such as Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative. However despite this progress, the administration’s attempt to “adopt a model of development based… on partnership, not patronage,” as Hillary Clinton has described, has been inconsistent.

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By Alina Paul, communications specialist, ICRISAT

It would be hard to walk down a village track in India without coming across a shack displaying colourful strips of shampoo sachets for 1 rupee (nearly 2 cents) or stacks of mini soap bars. Creative marketing has even brought these sachets to isolated villages on the back of camels.

Hindustan Unilever was behind this approach. They noticed that their soaps and shampoos were too expensive for poor people so they re-packaged them into small doses that they could afford. They initially sold them door-to-door, helped by ‘shakti ladies’ who were members of self-help groups receiving microcredit to become small entrepreneurs. The 1-rupee range now constitutes a significant part of Hindustan Unilever's revenues and sustains a healthy network of small shops.

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Zanele, from the Nyanga township in Cape Town, is living with HIV. Thanks to antiretroviral therapy (ART), she will be able to lead a full life and look after her baby girl Lilathi. But living with HIV also makes her 20 to 30 times more vulnerable to tuberculosis (TB), and she became ill with the disease one month ago. TB is responsible for one in four AIDS deaths and the co-epidemic is particularly devastating in Africa.

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Bernhard Schwartlander is director of the Evidence, Strategy and Results Department at UNAIDS. The opinions expressed are his own.

Tremendous gains against HIV have been made over the past three decades, but to decisively break the trajectory of the HIV epidemic and achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, a far more strategic approach to investment is needed.

We need to radically depart from existing approaches and instead put AIDS financing on an investment track, leading the way to a more targeted and strategic use of scarce resources.

To date, the approach to AIDS needs has been a “commodity” approach – interest groups and advocates of one or other aspect of the AIDS response have put forward their claim to funding and a total bill has been estimated on the basis of these atomised needs.

The failing in this approach is that the incentives lie only in maximising the claim for funding needs, and what it leaves out is any incentive for progammes to act as a whole to maximise results.

The alternative to the commodity approach is an investment paradigm which encourages countries to implement as a package the most effective programmes by capitalising on the best available evidence on what works in HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.

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Stefano Bertozzi is director of the HIV/TB Programme at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The opinions expressed are his own.

World AIDS Day provides us an annual occasion to pause, reflect, and take stock of how we are doing in the fight against HIV.

This year strikes me as especially noteworthy, and not just because of the well-documented breakthroughs and heartbreaks in HIV prevention research.

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Sharonann Lynch is HIV/AIDS Policy Advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières’ Access Campaign. The opinions expressed are her own.

Just over 10 years ago, doctors and nurses working for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) started to provide treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS in projects in Thailand and South Africa, where before they had simply provided palliative care as people withered away. 

Having seen the dramatic impact treatment has on people’s lives and on communities, we’ve scaled up treatment in our projects, which now span nearly twenty countries, with 170,000 people receiving life-saving HIV drugs. 

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Gottfried Hirnschall, the World Health Organisation's director for HIV/AIDS, spoke with AlertNet in London as a new United Nations health agencies report on HIV/AIDS was released. The international community has made extraordinary progress in the past decade in the fight against AIDS, but a funding crisis is putting those gains at risk, the report said.

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Sarah West is media manager at International HIV/AIDS Alliance. The opinions expressed are her own.

Giving birth should be about giving life. Not death,” says Lucia, an activist from Zambia.

Every day in Uganda 16 women die giving birth and each year more than 30,000 babies are born with HIV.

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Sharifah Nabukenya is a citizen journalist with Key Correspondent , a global network supported by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, which enables people from communities most affected by HIV to document the realities they and those they know face.The opinions expressed are her own.

Nulu Nabbumba Kisitu, from Kampala, Uganda is 25-years-old and HIV positive. Nulu has been looking after three HIV- negative siblings and an HIV-positive mother since she was 10.

She first learnt she was HIV positive at the age of 20. Nulu says she had suffered from all kinds of sicknesses throughout her childhood but had never known why.

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Sidi Sarro, a citizen journalist from Kenya who writes for the International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s Key Correspondents project, meets young sex workers from Kibera, Nairobi, one of the largest slums in the world. The opinions expressed are her own.

It is estimated that more than half of Nairobi’s population lives in Kibera and, according to the Centre for Disease Control, more than 20 percent of Kibera’s population is HIV positive.

Lack of reproductive healthcare is an issue that affects women and girls in this community. Many girls become pregnant and resolve to have unsafe abortions or drop out of school and enter into early marriage. Some will turn to sex work as a way to make ends meet.

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Home to more than 150 million people, low-lying Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated and least developed countries on Earth. 47 per cent of the population lacks access to a basic toilet (JMP 2010), and 110,000 deaths occur every year because of diarrhoeal diseases.

SHARE and its partners in Bangladesh -- ICDDR,B and WaterAid -- are addressing these challenges by undertaking research to improve sanitation and hygiene.

Filmed by Guy Collender, SHARE
Edited by Spencer Chumbley, SOAS Radio