Activists Protest Against Obama's PEPFAR Budget Cuts

via Plus News

Almost a thousand Swazi and South African HIV activists marched to the United States consulate in Johannesburg on 22 March 2012 to demand that the US continue supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria, and safeguard funding of its President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which US President Barack Obama's latest proposed budget will cut by 12 percent.

The march organizers - a coalition of international and regional HIV organizations, including the global medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the World AIDS Campaign, and the AIDS Rights Alliance Southern Africa - also called on the British and Australian governments to join their American counterparts in kick-starting a response to solve the Global Fund's financial crisis.

Without an emergency donor meeting, the Fund - already in need of at least US$ 2 billion - will only secure additional funding at its next scheduled replenishment in 2014.

"We're not asking for charity, we are asking for social justice," said Daygan Eagar, a researcher at the South African human rights organization, Section27. "The US spends more money in one day of war than we're asking for the Global Fund."

Representatives from MSF, Section27 and the South African AIDS lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign, were to meet with consular and PEPFAR representatives to discuss their concerns.
The demonstration was also endorsed by the two million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It followed similar protest action at US representative offices in Swaziland, according to Siphiwe Hlophe, a founder of the NGO, Swaziland for Positive Living (SWAPOL).

"If we are here, if we are laughing, it is because we are on drugs," she told the crowd. "Before the Global Fund we didn't have food, we didn't have pyschosocial support, we didn't disclose our HIV status - that all started when the Global Fund came. Look at how many of us are here today - that is the Global Fund."

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Jim Yong Kim: Obama's Choice for President of the World Bank

via The Washington Post, by By Elizabeth Flock and Hayley Tsukayama

President Obama’s surprise choice to head the World Bank is a physician and a major figure in the global health world.

Jim Yong Kim has served as Dartmouth College’s president for the past three years, but has devoted much of his life to improving health outcomes in the developing world. Obama highlighted Kim’s health development background as major factors in his nomination.

Along with Paul Farmer and others, Kim co-founded Partners in Health, an international health and social justice organization. He served as Director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, where he scaled up treatment, prevention, and care programs in developing countries. He has also worked on international tuberculosis policy.

“Dr. Kim has been a strong supporter of global public health,” said Tarik Jasaveric, a spokesman for the World Health Organization. “At WHO, Dr. Kim was instrumental in creating and implementing the 3 by 5 Initiative, which saw millions of people in the developing world gain access to anti-retroviral Therapy for HIV for the first time.”

The initiative, launched in 2003, sought to treat 3 million new patients infected by the disease by 2005. It reached its goal in 2007, The Washington Post reported. In 2006, he was named as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for his work on that campaign and his efforts combating drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru.

Kim also co-founded the Global Health Delivery Project, a joint initiative designed to improve public health in disadvantaged populations by “systematizing the study of global health delivery” and “rapidly disseminating knowledge to practitioners.”

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[Content that is linked from other sources is for informational purposes and should not construe a Mapping Pathways position.]

To End AIDS, We Need a Plan!

via Huffington Post, by Mitchell Warren

Last Thursday (December 1), on World AIDS Day, President Obama threw the full weight of the U.S. government behind a vision that would have seemed outlandish until now: The end of the global AIDS epidemic.

Over the past few years, a string of HIV prevention research breakthroughs has put that ambitious goal within sight for the first time. Voluntary medical male circumcision is the most powerful, under-utilized biomedical HIV prevention strategy available: with a single surgical procedure, men's risk of HIV from female partners is reduced by more than 60 percent. Treatment for HIV positive individuals is also potent prevention -- reducing risk of transmission by up to 96 percent.

These two strategies are the cornerstone of a new era of HIV prevention, and it is critical that the president continue to be a supporter and leader of the chorus of advocates, health and political leaders who are saying "Yes, we can end AIDS."

Now the question is: How will we achieve this goal? What are the priority actions to take today, tomorrow, and years from now?

First and foremost, the resource commitments need to match the strength of the scientific data. Funds are needed to ensure that the most effective prevention is put in place for the people who need it, in programs that meet their needs, with rigorous evaluation of impact so that no dollars are wasted.

President Obama's commitment to expand access to HIV treatment for two million more people by 2013 is a wonderful first step. But his call to the leaders of the world to match the US commitment must be heeded.

Last week, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - which supports HIV treatment programs in resource-poor countries along with PEPFAR - announced that it has been forced to curtail new grant-making until2014. The Fund pointed to a drop-off in contributions from governments in the face of the global economic crisis.

There's no question that economies are hurting. But global AIDS programs are among the smartest investments in history: they've saved countless lives and have shifted the course of the epidemic so that annual HIV infections are on a slow but steady decline. In most cases, these efforts represent a tiny share of donor countries' national budgets - for the U.S., it's well under one percent. It is precisely at this moment, when the potential dividends are greatest, that the world's modest AIDS investments should be sustained.

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[Content that is linked from other sources is for informational purposes and should not construe a Mapping Pathways position.]

AIDS Battle Risks Being Derailed by Global Financial Crisis

via Nature, by Meredith Wadman

Thirty years after AIDS was first recognized as a human scourge, major recent gains in treatment and prevention risk being derailed by the global financial crisis.

On 23 November, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced that it will not fund new grants for prevention and treatment until 2014, owing to “substantial budget challenges in some donor countries”. The fund's HIV activities run the gamut from counselling and testing pregnant women in India to providing medications to infected children in Kenya.

And on 7 December, a report from Policy Cures in Sydney, Australia, a group that monitors global research and development for neglected diseases, showed that public and private funders last year cut their commitments to HIV/AIDS research targeted at the developing world by US$67.5 million, or 5.9%. The decline was due entirely to cutbacks by wealthy nations, which slashed spending by $72.6 million; poorer countries actually increased funding by $5.1 million. Where research is concerned, “AIDS had a bigger drop in dollar terms than any other disease”, says Mary Moran, the executive director of Policy Cures and the lead author on the report.

The threat comes even as US President Barack Obama last week promised that the United States will step up its worldwide attack on AIDS. Breaking the White House's past reticence on the issue, he urged nations to honour their unmet pledges to the Global Fund.

“Countries that have committed to the Global Fund need to give the money that they promised,” he said on 1 December, World AIDS Day. “Countries that haven't made a pledge, they need to do so,” he added, singling out emerging nations such as China that are recipients of funds “but now are in a position to step up as major donors”.

The United States has given $6.1 billion to the Global Fund since 2004, and last year pledged to contribute $4 billion between 2011 and 2013. Congress approved $1.05 billion in 2011, meaning that allotments must increase substantially in 2012 and 2013 to honour the pledge. Obama has asked Congress to provide $1.3 billion in 2012, but Senate lawmakers have so far resisted the increase.

Obama pledged to increase by 50% — to 6 million — the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) worldwide by 2013 through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the nation's major global treatment and prevention programme. He also said PEPFAR would aim to provide ART to an additional 1.5 million pregnant women with HIV in the next two years. The international promises came with no new money immediately attached. But Obama has asked Congress to provide nearly $7.2 billion — a 6% increase — for PEPFAR in 2012, part of the unfinished budget bills still being debated.

Advocates said that his speech marked a significant turning point. “This is the first time he's signalled that he's going to champion global HIV in this way,” says Jennifer Cohn, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a policy adviser in Nairobi for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders). “Whether or not this gets translated into the president's 2013 budget request, or what Congress chooses to protect during the 2012 budget negotiations — that's what I'm waiting to hear.”

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[Content that is linked from other sources is for informational purposes and should not construe a Mapping Pathways position.]