By Sharonann Lynch, Médecins Sans Frontières | Wed., November 30, 7:50 PM | Comments ( 0 )
A girl who lost her mother to HIV/AIDS looks out the window at Nkosi's Haven, south of Johannesburg November 25, 2011. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko
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.
And thanks to support from international donors to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the U.S. government’s PEPFAR programme, and the contributions of affected countries themselves, HIV treatment has been extended to nearly seven million people in developing countries.
While still only one in two people who needs treatment receives it, this progress is critical.
Yet the global HIV effort is at a crossroads, with more potential than ever before to advance this progress and begin to reverse the epidemic, and more threats than ever before that could grind this progress to a halt.
This year has brought remarkable news on three fronts: First, landmark scientific evidence about HIV has shown that one of the best tools to prevent the spread of the virus – while saving lives – is HIV treatment itself: earlier treatment can reduce the risk of the virus being passed from one person to another by a dramatic 96 percent.
Second, in a political declaration at the United Nations (U.N.) in June, governments committed to ensure that 15 million people are on HIV treatment by 2015 – more than double the number today.
This was followed by the critical announcement in early November by the U.S. government that it had made the objective of an ‘AIDS-free generation’ official policy, building on the new scientific evidence.
But the bad news comes third: the Global Fund, for the first time ever since opening its doors 10 years ago, had to cancel an annual round of funding because international donors have left it in the lurch.
The news of this cancelled funding round is still reverberating around the world and the dust has yet to settle, which will show us just how big the impact will be on HIV, TB and malaria programmes in developing countries.
The stopgap measure is an emergency pot of funding that will, for example, prevent treatment interruptions for people already on HIV treatment.
Donor funding for HIV/AIDS has been on the decline for two years already and we have been witnessing the impact this funding crunch has had in places where we work.
In some countries, caps have been placed on the number of new people allowed to start treatment and severe funding shortfalls threaten the continuity of patients’ treatment.
In other countries, plans to implement better treatment strategies that will help save lives, prevent new infections and save money in the long run have had to be put on hold. A Global Fund without funding will make all this worse.
At a time that holds so much promise, it’s hard to understand how international donors can let the Global Fund go broke. It’s urgent that donors revive the best mechanism we have to protect people from the scourge of three of the world’s biggest killers.
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