Treatment

When members of Brigada Callejera, a sex workers' and transgender rights organization in Mexico City, came to the first of the AIDS2008 activist meetings last Saturday morning, they explained the human rights issues that sex workers here face. Not only are sex workers forced to take STD and HIV tests - and carry a card saying they are HIV negative - a new policy requires them to pay for these tests themselves. This repression is in addition to the fact that sex work is still illegal here, and the police are more likely to arrest workers if they carry condoms.

The group, whose members include Elvira Madrid, Krisna, and Elma Delea, also held a lively protest for access to HIV meds in Mexico yesterday. I believe that Krisna said in the activist meeting on Saturday that antiretrovirals cost 7,500 pesos per month (about $750) here in Mexico, but I need to fact-check that. She did say that indigenous people have almost no access to prevention or treatment services.  read more »

For those who didn't make it out of bed at 5am, or whatever ungodly hour you might have to get up to make it to Banamex by 7am, you missed out on some of the best IAC swag available so far courtesy of the Saddleback Church and its leaders Rick and Kay Warren. You also missed out on some very pointed questions during the Q&A about the Church's HIV/AIDS work in Rwanda and its lack of emphasis on prevention, resistance to condom distribution, and narrow theology of sexuality.

The Warrens are the leaders of the Saddleback empire, which includes their 22,000 member church in Orange County, CA, numerous national and international programs, regular speaking tours, Rick's bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life, and Kay's book, Dangerous Surrender. Rick will also be hosting both US Presidential candidates for a two hour "Compassion and Leadership" forum next week on network TV.  read more »

Hi everyone,

I've arrived in Mexico City - a place I once escaped to become a legit journalist, many years ago -- thinking I needed to get away from sprawling NYC. Little did I realise how much bigger the D. F. was... It's been 5 years since I was here, reporting in 2003 for a chapter of my (2006) book, Moving Mountains, on the progress of HIV treatment in Mexico. Then I compared the capital, the Distrito Federal, or D.F., as locals call the capital, to Oaxaca, off the Pacific, where the indigenos -- indigenous Mexican Indian communites --live in poverty that might surprise people who never get out of the cities or tourist areas of Oaxaca even. Successive Mexican governments have been locked in an identity and political war with indigenous communities here for a long time.. battles of land and power, and the result has been too little govt money or health programs for the poor communities, esp the indigenous.  read more »

The international AIDS conference in Mexico City will be my fifth consecutive meeting of this kind. I say this not to show off how many passport stamps I’ve acquired—Durban in 2000, then biannually Barcelona, Bangkok, Toronto—but because these meetings (which have gotten bigger and bigger and more and more circus-like) have become one of the ways that I keep track of time passing in my life and in the larger life of the activist and advocacy communities responding to the epidemic.

Each meeting has its signature moment. I’ll spare you my own personal roster. What’s more important, what’s stayed with me over the years, are the moments that become markers of where we are right now in the struggle to fully and adequately respond to the epidemic.

In Durban, it was the thousand colors, the hundred songs, the swell of energy at the march for treatment access. In Barcelona, it was the cacophony of voices shouting down US HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson. In Bangkok it wasn’t an event—just an overwhelming feeling that the world was not moving fast enough to scale up treatment.  read more »

Hello,

I am Lova Rakotomalala. I am a research scientist in Immunology/biomedical engineering for the nonprofit organization “Cytometry For Life” based at Purdue University.Our goal is to find practical solutions to the current lack of effective low-cost, portable solutions for disenfranchised remote regions in matters of HIV/AIDS treatments, specifically CD4 testing and monitoring. I am also a Global Voices Online editor and author, reporting conversations from communities in Madagascar and sub-saharan Africa. I also coordinate with a blogging team a citizen media outreach project for Rising Voices in Madagascar, foko-madagascar.

At the conference, I hope to start/participate a conversation on the right way to approach the technological gap in resource-limited regions from strategical and a financial point of view.  read more »

We've got the August 2008 special issue of AIDS which will be released at the IAC. The theme of this special issue is LEAP: Leadership, Equity, Accountability, and Partnerships to provide concrete recommendations for implementing the Ford Foundation's Global HIV/AIDS Initiative. We applaud the journal, the Ford Foundation and the authors for their emphasis on social justice.

Click the article title to jump to the abstract and PDF.

» Creating a world that survives, and thrives, with AIDS
» Moving beyond the alphabet soup of HIV prevention
» The next 5 years of global HIV/AIDS policy: critical gaps and strategies for effective responses
» Leadership development and HIV/AIDS
» Wealth, health, HIV and the economics of hope
» Gender and AIDS: time to act
» Stigma in the HIV/AIDS epidemic: a review of the literature and recommendations for the way forward
» The role of harm reduction in controlling HIV among injecting drug users
» Refocusing and prioritizing HIV programmes in conflict and post-conflict settings: funding recommendations
» Accountability in the global response to HIV: measuring progress, driving change
» Health and human rights in today's fight against HIV/AIDS

 read more »