BEIJINGNews (Updated
December 4, 2011)
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Nov 28 2011
By Sui-Lee Wee
BEIJING
The landmark petition,
delivered Monday by mail to the State Council Legislative Affairs Office, is a
bold test of
The three signatories had
filed separate lawsuits against their local governments after provincial
education bureaus rejected their applications for teaching jobs because
mandatory blood tests revealed they were HIV positive, even though they had
passed written tests and interviews.
The three men had hoped to
persuade the courts that a five-year-old law supposed to protect the employment
rights of people with HIV should supersede local regulations that prevent the
hiring of HIV-infected civil servants.
Two courts in
In the third lawsuit filed
in Guizhou, the judge told the plaintiff in October the courts "will not
accept the lawsuit and that the plaintiff should ask the local government to
solve it," Yu Fangqiang, whose Nanjing-based organization, Tianxia Gong,
advocates for people with HIV, told Reuters.
"We know that in a
country like
"The voices to defend
the employment rights of people with HIV tend to be drowned out by the
majority's sense of fear."
"But we also know
that the adherence to the country's rule of law and the equality of its people
is the country's soul and is the backbone of the country's modernization,"
it said.
"Every Chinese
citizen and every department will undoubtedly benefit from this and will not be
subject to the threat of the unlawful deprivation of their legitimate rights and
interests."
But the government has
since stepped up the fight against it, spending more on prevention programs,
launching schemes to give universal access to anti-retroviral drugs to contain
the disease, and introducing policies to curb discrimination.
The virus is now primarily
spread in the country via sexual contact.
In a country where taboos
surrounding sex remain strong and discussion of the topic is largely limited,
people with HIV/AIDS say, however, they are often stigmatized.
Yu said that
discrimination of people with HIV, especially in civil service recruitment, is
"still a very big problem."
People in
The petition, which was
sent to the government office that helps to draft and oversee the implementation
of laws, comes ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.
The signatories to the
petition said they had noted that Wen had previously "shown his
concern" for people with HIV on the day, by "shaking the hands and
embracing" HIV-infected people.
(Additional reporting by
Beijing Newsroom, Editing by Ken Wills and Sugita Katyal)
By Mynardo Macaraig (AFP)
– 3 December, 2011
MANILA
The government will have
to prioritise its funding to concentrate on helping the most at-risk communities
as it faces a budget shortfall of up to $370 million over the next five years,
health department assistant secretary Eric Tayag said.
"If we only have so
much, we have to prioritise the scope of our programmes, choosing the target
populations, choosing the specific areas," Tayag told AFP.
"It is a race against
time because the more cases there are, the more different kinds of financial
support are needed in the long run."
The number of HIV/AIDS
cases detected in the
But the
And more than 1,800 cases
have already been reported in the first 10 months of this year, exceeding the
1,591 cases reported for all of 2010, according to government data.
Tayag said the government
estimated it needed 35 billion pesos ($810 million) to carry out HIV-prevention
programmes from 2011 to 2016.
However the health
department had only identified foreign and local sources for 19 billion pesos
($440 million), leaving a projected shortfall of 16 billion pesos ($370
million).
The funding crunch is
expected to hit hardest when the current "round" of the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria runs out in November next year, said Maria Teresa
Bagasao, country director of UNAIDS.
Another "round"
of aid pledges was originally scheduled for next year but has been put back to
2013 and any grant money will not be released until 2014 at the earliest, she
told AFP.
"The country needs to
look at whether there is going to be a critical gap in the funding. It has to
actually sit down and identify where the gap will be. In prevention or
treatment?" Bagasao told AFP.
The Global Fund, a
UN-supported partnership of governments and private aid groups, had made up the
bulk of the foreign aid that paid for as much as 80 percent of the country's HIV
prevention and treatment programmes, Bagasao said.
Activists have accused the
government of cutting its own funding for HIV programmes and relying too much on
external sources.
"There was a gradual
decrease (in local funding) because of an over-reliance on external financing
like the Global Fund," said Jonas Bagas, spokesman for the Network to Stop
AIDS in the
Amid the budget concerns,
Tayag said the
"There are two
populations that are the drivers of the epidemic: men having sex with men and
injecting drug users," said Tayag, who oversees government programmes to
fight infectious diseases.
At least 46 percent of
infections recorded this year were from homosexual contact compared with 25
percent in 2006, according to the government data.
Officials say they were
caught off-guard by the rise in infections from homosexual contact when they had
been mainly concentrating on female sex workers.
Injecting drug users were
still a small proportion of the total but there had been a sharp rise from only
eight cases detected in 2009 to 147 last year, and another 80 in the first 10
months of 2011.
Previously, HIV had been
mainly spread through heterosexual contact. This had been curbed with many
HIV-prevention programmes focusing on educating and testing female sex workers,
according to Tayag.
Copyright © 2011 AFP.
By Kerry Sheridan (AFP)
– 2 December, 2011
"We can beat this
disease," Obama said at an event to mark World AIDS Day which included
speeches by satellite from former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and
appearances by U2 singer Bono and pop-soul singer Alicia Keys.
"We have saved so
many lives, let's finish the fight."
About 1.2 million
Americans are among the 34 million people worldwide who were living with
HIV/AIDS in 2010, a year when 1.8 million people died, down from a peak of 2.2
million five years earlier.
Despite many advances in
treatment and survival since the epidemic first surfaced 30 years ago, a UN
report said this week that funding dropped to $15 billion globally last year,
down from $15.9 billion in 2009.
Experts say that is well
short of the $24 billion needed by 2015 to mount an effective global response.
As Obama battles
Republican lawmakers over US budget priorities amid a mounting deficit, a White
House official stressed that the new boost in funds "will all be done
within existing resources and not require congressional approval."
Internationally, Obama
said the
Obama said the
Obama also appealed to
global partners, including
"Here's my message to
everyone out there. To the global community -- join us," he said.
"Countries that have
committed to the Global Fund need to give the money that they promised.
Countries that haven't made a pledge, they need to do so. That includes
countries that in the past might have been recipients but now are in a position
to step up as major donors.
"
Former president George W.
Bush, who spoke by satellite from
"World AIDS Day is a
day to celebrate success," Bush said. "There is nothing more effective
than PEPFAR," or the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, he added,
calling the number of lives saved by the program "staggering."
Antiretroviral drugs are
credited with saving 700,000 lives around the world last year alone.
Obama also described
PEPFAR as one of Bush's "greatest legacies."
Treatment with
antiretroviral drugs has been shown to suppress levels of the virus in 77
percent of people who follow the regimen, and it can cut the risk of
transmission to a partner by 96 percent, studies have shown.
New cases of HIV have
leveled off at about 50,000 in the
"The rate of new
infections may be going down elsewhere, but it's not going down here in
Obama said $15 million of
the new funding would go to support HIV medical clinics and $35 million was
earmarked for the state AIDS drug assistance programs.
In
In the
"The AIDS epidemic is
coming back in
"I am very worried
that the death rate is going to go up in America simply because of the budgetary
constraints on the states," said the former president, whose Clinton
Foundation works to get low-cost AIDS drugs to people in need.
"We can all lobby for
more effective expenditure of aid money, not just in the
Copyright © 2011 AFP.
By Sharifah Nabukenya,
International HIV/AIDS Alliance’s Key Correspondent
Nulu
Nabbumba Kisitu, from
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.
Remembering the day she
discovered her status, she says: “I cried, blamed myself, and regretted why I
was born. ‘How could this happen to me yet [I] am still a virgin. And my
parents and relatives hid this all from me?’”
While at school, Nulu says
classmates used to call her ‘musujja’ (malaria girl) because she was thin
and falling sick all the time.
She assumed family
responsibilities at 10 when her mother left home. Her youngest sister was three.
She would prepare food for the family, bathe her siblings and clean the house
after classes.
Nulu recalls how she
developed sores on her buttocks but feared to tell her father until they started
bleeding one day. “I could not imagine undressing in front of my father; there
was no one to help me and the pain was terrible,” she says.
In 1999, her father grew
very thin. He told his children he was suffering with typhoid but refused to go
to hospital. He died and their mother agreed to take them in.
Nulu says life was most
unbearable during Senior Five and Senior Six years as she fell sick frequently,
lost weight and appetite and got herpes but did not know that these were signs
of HIV.
“Teachers used to look
at me with pity until the head teacher decided to take me for screening, but I
was not briefed about my results,” she says.
During her Senior Six
vacation Nulu began preparing food alongside the road to raise money to pay for
university tuition as her mother could not afford it, but after four months she
fell into a coma and was admitted to Mulago hospital for three weeks, spending
all she had raised.
Before she was discharged
an HIV test was done. When the counselor told her she was HIV positive, she
laughed it off, saying it was impossible because she was a virgin, and left the
forms at his desk.
A week later she went to
another health centre and was again tested for HIV. The truth finally sunk in
when she was given results confirming her positive status.
She rushed to her aunt’s
place to break the news. Her aunt told her they had known her status since she
was born and advised her mother to reveal the information to her as she grew up
but she had refused.
After coming to terms with
the news, Nulu decided to be open about her status. She ended her relationship
with her boyfriend who was HIV negative and is now with a new partner who was
also born with HIV.
“Whenever I am stressed,
I run to him and we share our problems,” she says. Nulu says they intend to
marry and adopt children who are living with HIV.
The 25-year-old says she
wants to help others avoid the suffering she went through. She has completed a
counseling and guidance course at Makerere Institute for Social Development and
now works as a children’s counselor.
She says: “I have
brought smiles to faces of the youth. In all places I have travelled to in
Sharifah Nabukenya is a
Key Correspondent (www.keycorrespondents.org), 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.
By Sidi Sarro, HIV/AIDS
It
is estimated that more than half of
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.
Njoki* is a student in one
of Kibera’s primary schools. Unknown to her teachers, she lives a double life;
a student by day and a sex worker at night. She is barely fifteen.
Most school mornings,
Njoki arrives late and is often too tired to concentrate on her lessons. Her
guardian is a single parent who survives by brewing alcohol and engaging in sex
work.
As she is not able to take
care of Njoki and the other children under her care, Njoki supplements the
family income through sex work and still it is barely enough.
Thanks to free primary
school education, Njoki is able to go to school like other children her age. But
unlike most children her age, Njoki has already had one abortion.
At first, when her
guardian introduced her into the trade, she was still at a tender age and the
act was too painful but with time Njoki says she has got used to it.
Her clients, older men who
drink at the den where her guardian works, will go inside a room with her once
they have finished their drink and the money is paid to her guardian.
Njoki says she knows about
HIV and AIDS –she learnt about it in school – but still she has unprotected
sex with her clients as it pays more.
Caro*, 14, engages in sex
work so she can earn money without which she would go without the basics. Unlike
Njoki, Caro solicits for sex outside, along strategic places in the slum.
She will be seen scantily
dressed and heavily made up in a bid to attract clients. Her guardian is aware
of what Caro does because she too is a sex worker who had Caro while in the
trade.
Milli*, 15, is in school
studying for her primary school certificate. She has been taking care of her
three siblings since their mother died of an AIDS related illness.
Milli says she was
introduced into sex work and it has enabled her to pay for their basic needs.
She also knows the risks involved but asks who will take care of her family if
she doesn’t?
Child sex work is slowly
increasing, especially in slums, where it has become a means of survival for
many young people.
Most of these children are
either orphans or living with guardians who are in the same trade or too poor to
offer them the necessities of life.
Some guardians keep
destitute children in the guise of helping them then act as their pimps, hiring
them for sex in exchange for money.
Child sex work not only
undermines the rights of these children but also destroys their future and
exposes them to drugs, HIV and AIDS, abortions, early marriage and death.
With almost half of all
new HIV infections in the world among people under the age of 25, and four out
of every 100 Kenyan women aged between 15 and 19 being HIV positive, more must
be done to enable girls such as Njoki, Caro and Milli to realise their
reproductive health rights.
The lives they live are
currently a far cry away from those that would make the World AIDS Day vision of
getting to zero new HIV infections a reality.
Sidi Sarro is a 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 names in this article
have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.
01 Dec 2011
Source: Content partner //
IRIN
South African government
has chosen World AIDS Day 2011 to launch its new national strategic plan that,
for the first time, will guide not only the national fight against HIV but also
tuberculosis (TB) until 2016. The document contains several major policy
changes, including the immediate provision of lifelong antiretroviral (ARV)
drugs to all HIV-positive mothers and TB patients, as well as a focus on
positive prevention. '
By Lucica Ditiu, Stop TB
Partnership, 1 December, 2011.
Lucica Ditiu is Executive
Secretary of Stop TB Partnership
On this World AIDS Day,
when HIV programmes around the world are facing an era of significant
financial constraint, it is a good moment to consider how to make the most of
the resources we have for saving and improving the lives of people living with
HIV. There is one highly cost-efficient intervention on which we are clearly
failing to fully capitalize: preventing and treating tuberculosis (TB) – the
number one killer of people living with HIV.
Important lessons can be
learned from a small but growing number of HIV programmes that are demonstrating
daily how simple it is to prevent TB deaths among people living with HIV and how
little it costs. Take the Nyanga health clinic in
Recently, Peta made
her first visit to the HIV wellness centre at the clinic. She had tested
positive for HIV a few weeks earlier.
Sister Fuzile, one of the
centre's nurses, asks Peta about her living arrangements. How big is the
space and how many people live there? Is there enough fresh air? These questions
might seem tangential to management of HIV, but the answers can guide
life-or-death decisions.
Although Peta did not
demonstrate the classic symptoms of TB, Sister Fuzile considered her at high
risk. TB takes the lives of one in four people living with HIV and is rampant in
Sister Fuzile sent Peta
for TB testing straight away. If the test comes back positive she will start TB
treatment immediately, with an excellent chance of being cured after six months.
Without treatment TB can be fatal in a matter of weeks.
The Nyanga centre is using
a formula that works. You can save the lives of people living with HIV by
getting answers to a short list of questions, providing a TB test if the answers
indicate risk, and providing TB treatment to people who have a positive TB test.
If people test negative but are at risk, give them a cheap preventive treatment.
A scientific model
produced earlier this year by the Stop TB Partnership, World Health Organization
and UNAIDS shows that if countries around the world scaled up these practices,
we could prevent a million TB deaths among people living with HIV by 2015.
Yet too few health
programmes in places where both HIV and TB are prevalent are taking these steps
- even though TB can be diagnosed and cured for as little as $100 in most
countries. If that does not change, people with HIV—even those receiving
ART—will continue to die of TB. More than a million and a half will die by the
end of 2015.
Although TB prevention and
treatment are inexpensive, it is unlikely we can achieve the save a million goal
without new financial commitments. Last week, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria announced that it was cancelling its plans to offer a
new round of grants because of drastically lowered donor commitments. This could
spell disaster for HIV, TB and TB/HIV programmes. We do not believe the world
will stand by and allow the enormous progress made to date on the HIV pandemic
to be reversed. New donors must and will step up to the plate. Countries
with fast-growing economies - especially those that themselves have a high
burden of HIV and TB - have a special responsibility to commit more funds to
fight HIV and TB, both at home and abroad.
Let us not squander the
huge investment the world has made in the health of people living with HIV by
losing them to TB, a curable illness. Zero TB deaths among people living with
HIV is an achievable goal - if not in our lifetimes, then surely in our
children's lifetimes.
29 Nov 2011
By Katy Migiro
NAIROBI
“For eight months that
boy just wasted away,” said Sister Mary Owens, an Irish nun who runs Nyumbani,
an orphanage for HIV-positive children, just outside
“You can imagine our
children coming home from school every day, going in to say hello to Sammy. And
what was going on in their hearts? Is this going to happen to me?”
Sammy died in September
2008.
His death was a “wake-up
call” for the orphanage, Owens said.
The third-line ARVs that
Sammy needed cost about $25,000 a year because they are only available from
major pharmaceutical companies.
HIV patients gradually
have to move from first- to second- to third-line treatment as the virus
develops resistance to medication.
Six months ago, Nyumbani
managed to get healthcare companies Johnson and Johnson and Merck to donate
third-line drugs to two of its 114 orphans.
But it has another 40
children in the orphanage taking second-line ARVs who will eventually need
third-line drugs, and many more in its village and community programmes.
“Our experience is that
children develop resistance faster than adults because their little bodies are
growing all the time,” said Owens.
“We need to get access,
in
PRICES PLUMMETED
Over the last decade,
prices for first-line ARVs have plummeted from over $10,000 a year to under $70
with the manufacture of generics, mainly in
As a result, the number of
people accessing the drugs has soared. Around 47 percent of the 14.2 million
people eligible for treatment in low- and middle-income countries are now
receiving it, according to UNAIDS.
“Up until 2003, we were
losing a child nearly every month,” said Protus Lumiti, Nyumbani’s general
manager, surveying a small graveyard of crosses hidden behind the orphanage’s
kindergarten.
Before the advent of
affordable drugs, HIV was a death sentence.
“All we could do was
give quality care to the children for the short life that they would have, maybe
three to five years,” said Owen.
Many of Nyumbani’s
children died when they were just a few months old, abandoned by their mothers
by the roadside or in hospital.
JUST LIKE ANY OTHER CHILD
Today, it is a different
story. Metres away from the graveyard, healthy children played football in the
midday sun.
Nyumbani has not lost a
child since Sammy died.
All of the children who
need first- and second-line ARVs are receiving them, thanks to cheap generics.
The home’s oldest orphan
is now 29 years old, living and working independently in
“There’s no known
limit to their lifespan provided conditions are maintained,” said Owens.
“The world is ahead of
them. They can dream their dreams, just like any other child.”
The price of second-line
drugs has fallen from $1,500 to $450 over the last four years, largely due to a
large purchase guarantee from UNITAID, an innovative funding mechanism aimed at
increasing access to treatment of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in poor
countries.
“This gave them the
incentive to produce higher volumes of the medicines and therefore bring the
price down,” said Daniela Bagozzi, UNITAID’s spokeswoman.
UNITAID, which is largely
funded by a levy on airline tickets, provides 77 percent of second-line ARVs in
the developing world.
By guaranteeing markets to
generic manufacturers, it has also spearheaded the production of pediatric
drugs, increasing the number of children on ARVs from 30,000 in 2006 to 400,000.
PATENT RIGHTS
But Indian generic
manufacturers cannot waive the patent on drugs invented after 2005 – such as
third-line ARVs – because of the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, which protects
pharmaceutical industries’ patent rights for around 20 years.
Campaigners want big
pharmaceutical companies to join the Medicines Patent Pool, set up by UNITAID in
2010.
Until now, they have
struck voluntary licensing deals, allowing generic copies of HIV products on a
case-by-case basis.
The patent pool aims to
provide a "one-stop shop" for generic companies to access patents for
a small royalty, enabling the latest drugs to become affordable to patients in
the developing world.
In July, Gilead Sciences,
the leading maker of HIV drugs, became the first major pharmaceutical
manufacturer to join the pool.
“We need to find an
agreement with the companies who are producing these drugs to invite them to
join the patent pool that can allow the generic companies to produce that
third-line therapy,” said Philippe Duneton, UNITAID’s deputy executive
secretary.