IT’S 25 years since the first reports of AIDS in the world, but the underlying causes still need to be addressed.
That’s the warning from Catholic delegates who attended a United Nations conference on AIDS.
The international community still has to focus on poverty eradication, cultural barriers and funding for faith-based organisations to halt and reverse the pandemic, the Catholic delegates said.
The high-level meeting at UN headquarters in New York from May 31-June 2 was a follow-up to a 2001 assembly that reached the first wide-ranging consensus on measures to curb the spread of AIDS and provide greater access to treatment.
The non-binding declaration issued at the end of this meeting serves as a blueprint, mainly reaffirming earlier pledges without any specifics as to national plans of action or financial commitment that would get countries on track to reach the 2010 target of universal access to AIDS prevention, treatment and care.
However, the declaration did not address strongly enough the link between HIV/AIDS and poverty, said Chris Bain, director of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, an aid agency of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
“We’ve got to tackle wider areas of poverty, the absence of basic services in poor countries, like health care and education,” he said.
“Access to anti-retroviral treatments may be increasing, but the cost of drugs for other diseases like malaria and tuberculosis still remains high. Clinics in poor countries are underfunded and underresourced,” Mr Bain said.
Just 4 per cent of money raised by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria since its launch in 2002 has been disbursed to faith based organisations, yet the Vatican estimates that 27 per cent of HIV/AIDS treatment centres worldwide are Catholic based.
In some countries, Catholic agencies provide 50 per cent of all health care services, a fact that Mr Bain said should spur the Global Fund and others to alter their distribution systems.
“Some areas see the Church as always regressive simply because we will not support condom based strategies,” he said.
“But the Catholic Church is one of the single biggest blocks providing support to HIV/AIDS sufferers.
“The Church has been at the forefront of abolishing the stigma (associated with HIV/AIDS). It has always fought against the abuse of women. Female religious orders in Africa are really on the cutting edge of HIV/AIDS care.
“That’s one reason I came to the meeting – to make sure faith based organisations, particularly Catholic ones, were seen as part of the solution,” he said.
Franciscan Father Michael Perry, the Africa program co-ordinator for Franciscans International, a non-governmental organisation at the United Nations, also said that without greater efforts at reducing poverty rates the efforts to combat AIDS would be stymied.
“It is a moral issue, but not in terms of judging a person’s behaviour. The greater moral issue lies in the scandalous situations of poverty,” he said.
In focus groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Kenya, teenage girls and young women told Fr Perry of turning to prostitution to support their families, including younger siblings orphaned by AIDS, because they lacked the skills and employment opportunities to generate income in other ways.
Among young people aged 15-24 in sub-Saharan Africa, three women are infected with HIV for every man.
Assumption Sister Florence Muia of Nairobi, Kenya, who in 2003 founded Upendo Village, a home based care program in Kenya that provides services to 1172 HIV-positive people and their families, said that gender inequality remains a big obstacle in the fight against AIDS.
She said boys are chosen over girls to go to school; underage girls are married against their will; rape is often condoned; and laws prevent women from owning property.
“It is a culture where women have no power to negotiate,” she said.
Sr Muia said she began selling beadwork crafted by women involved with Upendo Village to create independent income for them.
While education and prevention receive a lot of focus, Sr Muia said that treatment efforts need to be increased.
AIDS sufferers are often “more statistics than real faces. Until we show a commitment to supporting them, it will be very difficult to eradicate HIV and AIDS. Many people shy away from coming out, because what is there to support them?” she said.
In turn, she said, the less people get tested and seek treatment, the more they unknowingly spread HIV.
An estimated 38.6 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, with 4.1 million newly infected and 2.8 million killed by AIDS in 2005.
While the funding targets set in 2001 were met in 2005 – with US$8.3 billion raised last year, up from US$1.6 billion in 2001 – fewer than half the goals were achieved. The 2001 Declaration of Commitment called for 90 per cent of young people to have a comprehensive understanding about AIDS, but according to a UN report released ahead of the meeting, less than 50 per cent do.
Only 9 per cent of HIV-positive pregnant women receive treatment to protect against mother-to-child infection, far below the 80 per cent target.
More than US$20 billion will be needed annually by the end of the decade, said the UN report.
CNS
