A report released today (11 May 2011) by the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) revealed that several countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic are improving HIV treatment to reduce deaths and illness – but a lack of support from donors prevents many from making vital changes. This fragile progress needs sustained support, but the two biggest AIDS donors, the US and UK, are opposing a critical HIV treatment target ahead of next month’s AIDS Summit in New York at a time when mounting evidence shows that HIV treatment can also prevent HIV infections.
MSF began providing antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV/AIDS in 2000 in Thailand, Cameroon, and South Africa, to a limited number of people in urgent need of treatment. At the time, doctors and nurses faced very sick patients in over-crowded waiting rooms. Initially providing treatment in dedicated HIV/AIDS projects, MSF has increasingly decentralised HIV services, including prevention, treatment and care, into primary health care facilities and partnered with health ministries to deliver care.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed time and again how treatment dramatically reduces illness and deaths in the communities in which we work. Today, MSF treats more than 170,000 people in 19 countries, and some MSF projects have been able to reach and maintain so-called ‘universal access’ to treatment in their districts.
As governments meet to draw up the blueprint for the next decade of the global HIV/AIDS response at a UN High-Level Meeting in New York in June 2011, they must recommit to their past promises to bring life-saving treatment to all in need, support an ambitious treatment target, and ensure the policies are in place to improve the quality of care, reduce the burden on patients and on health systems, support lowering the costs of drugs, and foster the needed medical innovation.
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