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This World Aids Day, instead of celebrating a turning point after years of life-saving investment and research, the fight against HIV is facing a serious setback.
The largest single donor for HIV funding, The Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria, has announced that it has cancelled its next round of grant-making, after failing to secure the minimum $13 billion needed to maintain programmes.
International health charity Merlin, which provides HIV testing and counselling, treatment, care and education in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Somalia warns that the cuts will hit the least developed countries hardest.
In a bitter-sweet ceremony to mark World AIDS Day 2011, Merlin’s health workers were today presented with an Outstanding Achievement Award for their HIV work by the vice president of Puntland government and the chairman of Puntland Aids Commission (PAC), General Abdisamad Ali Shire. Merlin’s programme, which focuses on the integrated prevention, treatment and care of HIV/ AIDS and TB, covers a population of 400,000, but with the reduction in funding both their work and the lives of the people they treat are in serious jeopardy.
Merlin’s Somalia Health Coordinator Dr Isak says: “It is pretty catastrophic for HIV and TB funding. The cuts to the Global Fund will also reduce pay and support costs which will lead to higher staff turnover, as well as poor administrative and logistic support. Ultimately the quality of the services will suffer and so will the patients.”
Until now, The Global Fund has also financed almost 100 per cent of the national anti-retroviral therapy programmes in South Sudan where over 3,000 people are living with HIV.
Merlin has been working in South Sudan since 1997 and is currently treating hundreds of people with antiretroviral therapy (ART), including 13 children under the age of 14. However with the suspension of funding, the outlook for the enrolment and treatment of new HIV positive individuals requiring the life-saving antiretroviral drugs is looking bleak.
Merlin’s Country Director for South Sudan Dr Tewodros GebreMichael says: “The impact on people acquiring the infection will be severe unless a rescue plan is put in place as soon as possible to address the funding shortfalls. It is definitely a huge shock to the national programmes in maintaining the gains they made and in terms of meeting the growing needs of the people. It will mean new patients who contract HIV will not be able to begin treatment.”
Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals the United Nations has pledged to achieve by 2015, but instead of getting nearer those goals are more distant than ever.
