G20 Coverage: Funeral Procession for HIV and AIDS Funding?

Max October will be covering the G20 for RH Reality Check.

Starting at 1:30 today, RH Reality Check is kindly hosting live blogging and twittering of a funeral procession held by AIDS activists at the G20 conference in Pittsburgh today at 2pm. The funeral procession will be a visual reminder of the toll of the G20 nations' decisions (or lack of decisions) about the economy and global health.

But the real story here is not about the funeral procession. The real story is the stories of the people with HIV and AIDS or at risk for HIV and AIDS in the global south, in countries like South Africa, Rwanda, Malawi, and others. Over the past decades, through efforts of AIDS activists working locally and internationally, people in poor countries were starting to see improvement: things like more access to treatment, lowered cost of HIV drugs, and increased life expectancies.

But when the global recession hit, the donor nations went back on their promises. Instead of expanding successful programs that have saved millions of lives, countries are scaling back and not paying the money they had pledged. The direct result of this scaling back is clinics not taking new patients, as is happening right now in South Africa. It is the government of Uganda ending their program of providing free retroviral drugs to poor citizens. It is medicine stock- outs in Malawi, where the country cannot afford to stock the treatments its citizens need, so that even if an individual could afford medicine, it is simply not available.

And those are just stories about treatment. One reality of HIV/AIDS is that once a person starts treatment, they cannot stop treatment. Stopping treatment has devastating consequences for the course of the disease, and restarting it does not work. So when funding is short and,programs need to be cut, prevention programs are cut first, despite the fact that prevention is as important as treatment in ending the epidemic. This is why it is incredibly important that the rich nations at the G20 conference commit to increasing funding to fight global AIDS, not decrease funding.

One particularly important commitment the G20 nations need to honor is their commitment to the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria. The Global Fund is funded by rich nations and solicits grants from poorer countries affected by the AIDS epidemic. This multilateral funding allows programs like condom distribution and family planning that can't be funded by the US, under current law. In order to continue to provide women and men at risk of contracting HIV with access to the tools to protect their own reproductive health, the G20 nations must increase their commitment to the Global Fund. All treatment programs should be kept open and expanded, and preventions efforts must be kept open and accessible as well.

This is why we are processing, blogging, and tweeting today. Continue to follow us on twitter and here throughout the afternoon, as we bring the messages of speakers from groups such as New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice, the Metropolitan Community Church, and Azania Heritage International.