The State of the Global AIDS Crisis:
- There are 33 million people living with HIV worldwide. 15 million of them are in desperate need of treatment, but only 5.2 million have access.
- Three million people are still infected with HIV every year. Most of them are women.
- AIDS killed 1.8 million people in 2009 (down from 2.1 million in 2004). It is the leading cause of death of women of reproductive age.
- AIDS kills 60,000 mothers each year. According to the Lancet, while maternal deaths overall have declined in recent years, the number of deaths each year would be significantly less if the AIDS epidemic had not occurred.
The US commitment to fighting global AIDS:
- In 2003, after a year-long activist campaign, President Bush announced his support of a five-year initiative to spend $15 billion on global AIDS, including treating two million people with HIV and preventing five million new infections. This initiative was known as PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Over those five years, Congress actually spent $19 billion on PEPFAR programs.
- In 2004, the US spent less than $2 billion on global AIDS programs. By 2009, that amount had more than tripled to $5.47 billion.
- During the 2008 presidential campaign, activists worked to get each of the candidates to agree to support $50 billion over the next five years for global AIDS programs. This would allow the US to more than double the number of people on HIV treatment, increase access to proven HIV prevention tools, and train and retain hundreds of thousands of desperately needed health workers. All of the Democratic Candidates, including then-candidates Obama, Biden and Clinton, signed on to support this.
- Because of the support of candidates Obama and McCain, Congess reauthorized PEPFAR, in an Act known as Lantos/Hyde, and authorized $48 billion over five years for AIDS, TB, and Malaria. This promise of dramatically increased funding spurred organizations working to implement the program to begin to enroll more patients in care.
- However, since 2009, the US has not increased funding for global AIDS to keep up with inflation. Access to medicine for those patients who were enrolled in programs after Congress reauthorized PEPFAR is at risk.
- After the US broke its promise to fund global AIDS programs at the level Congress authorized, other wealthy nations followed suit. Global funding for HIV/AIDS programs has not increased in several years, and countries are indicating that they will not increase funding again, at least until the US does.
The impact of flat-funding on people with AIDS:
- Many people who were promised medication are being told there is no medicine available, and are being told to wait in line. This has been documented and confirmed in Uganda, Nigeria and Zambia. Other countries are reporting similar situations.
- In Uganda, orders were issued by PEPFAR and US Agency for International Development staff to completely halt treatment expansion—people can only be added to treatment when others die or are “lost to follow up”. This has since been reversed, due to activist pressure. But this situation is not unique, and any number of countries could face similar issues unless the US Congress and the Obama Administration call for more funding for global AIDS. Click here to read Health GAP's statement on the lifting of the treatment caps in Uganda.
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Point-by-point rebuttal of the Obama Administration's Half-truths and un-truths about their decision to essentially flat-line funding for global AIDS.
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