HIV Is Treatable, It's the Stigma That's Fatal
The
murder in June of Vivian Kavuma in Uganda by her lover after she
disclosed that she was infected with HIV.
The brutal stabbing with a pitchfork of 15-year-old Isaiah
Gakuyo last April in Kenya by his uncle simply because the
orphan was HIV-positive. There were numerous witnesses to the
attack, but none intervened.
The murder of in June 2005 human rights activist Octavio Acuña
Rubio in a condom shop he owned in Mexico.
The arrests in December of five Zimbabwean AIDS activists
commemorating World AIDS Day at a public square in Harare.
The house arrests in March this year of at least 23 people
living with HIV in China's Henan Province to keep them from
bringing petitions to the Chinese congress.
And the list goes on.
"We have the knowledge to defeat HIV now, we know what is
effective, and that is recognising that the epidemic is caused
by human rights abuses, which fuel the epidemic," Joseph Amon,
director of the HIV/AIDS Programme at Human Rights Watch (HRW),
told IPS.
Since the virus was first identified in the early 1980s,
HIV/AIDS has claimed 22 million lives and infected over 60
million people. Last year, five million people were newly
infected and three million died of AIDS.
Between 2003 and 2005, the number of people living with HIV in
East Asia rose by more than 25 percent and the number of people
living with HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia rose more
than one-third.
But according to HRW and others, in the 25 years since AIDS was
first discovered, few countries have succeeded in controlling
the epidemic. Those that have done so have provided
comprehensive information on HIV transmission to their
populations, addressed the vulnerability of women and girls to
violence and abuses, ensured access to condoms, clean needles
and methadone, and expanded access to anti-retroviral drugs.
Experts stress that vulnerability to HIV/AIDS is closely tied to
the social marginalisation of people most affected by the virus.
They include young girls, injecting drug-users, sex workers, men
who have sex with men, migrants and prisoners, categories which
are frequently victims of discrimination and other human rights
abuses.
The connection between abuses of women's rights and their
vulnerability to the disease is particularly evident in
sub-Saharan Africa, where 58 percent of those infected with AIDS
are women. According to HRW, in 2003, half of all governments in
sub-Saharan Africa had yet to adopt laws specifically banning
discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS, while only
one-third of countries worldwide had adopted legal measures
specifically outlawing discrimination against populations
vulnerable to the disease.
"If we attack the epidemic by attacking human rights abuses we
can turn the epidemic around. The way we can do that is to have
comprehensive prevention and information provided to people. We
need to empower communities to take the step that they need to
recognise the epidemic and respond to it," Amon told IPS.
Documenting and punishing human rights abuses related to
HIV/AIDS is essential in raising public awareness and fighting
the epidemic. Unless countries adopt approaches to HIV that are
rooted in human rights principles and informed by scientific
evidence, the epidemic will keep growing, HRW says.
The need for global HIV prevention based on sound scientific
evidence is supported by groups like the Caucus for
Evidence-Based Prevention, a coalition of U.S.-based
non-governmental organisations and their international partners
whose aim is to implement strategies with proven success in
lowering HIV transmission rates.
In fact, according to the multidisciplinary group of more than
30 organisations, for different reasons, too often strategies
with no proven efficacy have been promoted instead of those that
are known to work.
For example, in Uganda, once one of the continent's greatest
success stories in reducing HIV rates, infections are now on the
rise again since the government and evangelical groups have
pushed abstinence-only messages and attacked the effectiveness
of condoms.
In Thailand, another initial bright spot in the fight against
AIDS, condom use is down and infections of sexually transmitted
diseases are up. HRW says the government has done little to
reduce HIV infection among drug users or migrant workers, and
leading AIDS experts say that Thailand's success is "history".
In Zimbabwe, some 350,000 people urgently need anti-retroviral
drugs but only about 25,000 have access to them. The life
expectancy for women is 34 years -- the lowest in the world.
In the United States, African American women are 19 times more
likely to be infected with HIV than white women. The number of
new infections has remained static for a decade, and HRW says
that "programmes that once vigorously and creatively challenged
communities to confront AIDS and learn how to protect themselves
from HIV are being replaced by proposals to eliminate individual
pre-test counseling and written consent, and simply have doctors
routinely test everyone they treat for HIV."
"One of the ways to combat the epidemic is by having greater
accountability by governments, having better cooperation between
civil society and governments in terms of monitoring the
epidemic, having specific concrete goals and having periodic
reports that include civil society in terms of tracking
progress," Amon said.
"In Southern Africa, for instance, there are many policies which
maintain the vulnerability of women and there is also a lack of
protection and enforcement of property rights abuses. The
traditional systems often do very little to respond to those
abuses," he noted.
At the just-concluded Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg,
Russia, leaders of the world's richest nations adopted a
document pledging to achieve "tangible progress" in the fight
against HIV/AIDS by 2010. However, activists said donors must
also increase funding or they would miss their own target, set
last year at the summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, of providing
treatment to four million Africans by that same deadline.
In order to achieve universal treatment for HIV/AIDS, at least
an additional 10 billion dollars would be needed, they note.
Many hopes are now pinned on the Aug. 13-18 conference in
Toronto, where HRW has called on government representatives,
United Nations officials and delegates to recognise that "only
by protecting the rights of those most vulnerable, and by
empowering those most marginalised, can the few success stories
to date in the fight against AIDS be expanded and sustained."
Source: Alberto Cremonesi,
Inter Press Service News Agency
|
