The new AIDS treatment access numbers released by the World Health Organization (WHO) are a grave warning about the state of AIDS treatment scale-up.
In the last 12 months, treatment access grew by 700,000 to a total of two million people, but many millions more remain in urgent need of antiretroviral therapy. At this rate of expansion, the WHO report explains, the world will fall five million people short of the internationally declared and reaffirmed universal treatment access target of 9.8 million on treatment by 2010 (See Note 1).
"The numbers don't tell the full story of what is happening -- the lives lost, families destroyed, villages decimated," said Obatunde Oladapo, from ITPC and the Treatment Access Movement in Nigeria. "This is an avoidable catastrophe unfolding while the world watches it happen."
Why universal access treatment goals are in peril:
Though access to AIDS treatment has expanded over the last three years, there are many disturbing signs that the momentum of the "3 by 5" campaign has been lost, and the AIDS treatment scale-up effort is stagnating:
- Only 26 of over 100 countries have developed costed national plans for key HIV/AIDS interventions
- a more than 75% failure rate to complete the first agreed upon milestone. This lack of national leadership and commitment is the key barrier to saving millions of lives.
- WHO -- the lead United Nations agency on AIDS treatment -- is not sufficiently funded to maintain a strong focus on AIDS treatment scale- up. The agency is trying to managing a diverse set of priorities with a too small budget for HIV/AIDS programs at its headquarters in Geneva.
- The G8 countries have not adequately honored their 2005 Gleneagles commitments to universal access to treatment, prevention and care. Without the funds they have promised to provide, hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths are inevitable.
- Some AIDS policy makers and advocates continue to pit treatment and prevention against each other, failing to recognize that only a comprehensive response that integrates treatment, prevention and care will reverse the pandemic.
"There is still time to meet the goal of universal access for HIV treatment, prevention, and care," said Gregg Gonsalves, programme director for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa and a member of ITPC. "But not without an integrated approach. Increased prevention efforts are critical, but those who say that treatment is unsustainable with the current number of people living with HIV/AIDS should understand that this is an implicit call to sacrifice millions of lives rather than provide the necessary resources to save them."
Six actions to avert needless tragedy:
The International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), a network of over 800 people living with HIV/AIDS and their supporters from 125 countries, demands that country governments and international donors and institutions take immediate action to accelerate AIDS treatment delivery, using this effort to build stronger health systems that also provide HIV prevention, TB diagnosis and treatment, and other services.
"There is tremendous worldwide support for scaling-up AIDS treatment at the grassroots -- among ordinary men, women and children, among families that are affected by HIV/AIDS," said Frika Chia Iskandar from ITPC and the Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS in Indonesia. "This momentum can be used to strengthen health services overall in our communities."