At the end of last month, this newspaper’s Sunday column “Women’s Chronicles” published a conversation with a 30-year-old mother of four who has been living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) for 13 years. The woman in question is not ill and speaks of hopefully of being able to provide a better life for her children at some point. Someone living with HIV for 13 years in what appears to be a healthy fashion is an apparently positive indication of the management of people living with HIV in Guyana.
It could be what is termed a positive or success story, except that in the case cited above the success is clearly minimal. The woman is unable to provide any sort of life for her children because she has no job and the children currently live with her grandmother. Two of the men with whom she had children are dead, having succumbed to illnesses relating to being HIV positive themselves. The third man abused her physically for years until she left him.
Based on the things she told the columnist this is a woman with abandonment issues. She has a minor disability, which she believes might have been the reason her mother chose not to raise her. She grew up with her grandmother, was a slow learner and never finished high school. She was both pregnant and HIV positive by age 17 and quickly abandoned by the man responsible for both conditions. At present, she is a member of a local support group which, according to its leader, has many other women with similar challenges.
If any of these women, and for that matter people living with HIV in general, were to be unable to access the drugs that prevent their immune systems from becoming deficient, the crises would be monumental. Yet, there is a chance of that happening if the government does not wake up and include funding for HIV programmes and drugs in its health budget.
According to a Reuters report published on Tuesday last, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) stated that global funding for the AIDS fight dropped by nearly US$1 billion in 2018. And while, it pointed out that there has been “impressive” progress in some countries, there have also been rising numbers of new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths in other places. Australia, for example, has just reported an encouraging drop in new HIV infections. In fact, it is being touted as a model country and one that could be on the way to eradicating transmission of the disease. But on the dismal side, UNAIDS is reporting “worrying increases” in new infections in eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America.
Then there is the United States where HIV has different effects on whites as opposed to minorities. The US Centers for Disease Control reported last week that while overall infection rates have fallen, they remain “stubbornly high” among African American men (43% of the new diagnoses) and were growing among Latino men (25% of new infections). Globally, new infections have been mostly among sex workers, drug users, men who have sex with men, transgender people, prisoners and the sexual partners of these groups, according to UNAIDS.
The organisation noted that international donors gave less towards the AIDS fight and countries did not pick up the slack, resulting in a shortfall of US$7.2 billion less than what is needed by next year. Whether this deficit will be made up between now and then remains to be seen. However, given the current facts, countries should not hold onto too much hope.
It is no secret that the Trump administration reinstated and added to the American Global Gag Rule in 2017. The fallout from this has been that if NGOs which receive US funding provided, counselled, or disseminated information about abortion as part of family planning services they would lose that funding. Unfortunately, many NGOs provide both HIV and family planning services that include counselling and referrals for medical termination of pregnancy. This has already affected a prominent NGO in Africa, threatens the Organization of American States and could easily include other international bodies. Meanwhile, just this month professionals in the global medical and developmental sphere expressed worry that Canada could be about to step back from its leadership in funding the eradication of HIV/AIDS tuberculosis and malaria. If this happens, targets will not be met and the developing countries that depend on funding for these programmes will have to look at meeting the needs themselves or scaling back. The latter is the more likely scenario.
One has to consider that countries which committed to spending down HIV some 20 years ago, might not have expected that obligation to go on for infinity. Furthermore, HIV is not the only global ill that needs money; there are natural disasters almost every year and global poverty is still a huge issue, among others.
Guyana, indeed the entire Latin America and the Caribbean region, is still hugely dependent on foreign aid and grants to boost health budgets and especially where HIV/AIDS is concerned. Scaling back in programmes could adversely affect groups and individuals like the woman referred to above. Their children in turn would have less of a chance of breaking the cycle that contributed to their mothers’ woes. One hopes that government takes serious note of international developments and prepares to fill the gaps where necessary.
