Compiled by Martin Flynn & Bruce Wainwright
France & UK promote air tax levy for HIV
France and Britain have struck a deal that has ensured UK support
for a tax on air travel to generate funds to fight HIV.
British Chancellor Gordon Brown agreed to support the air travel levy if France
backed his plan to increase aid for poor countries through an international
finance facility.
Campaign groups said the agreement, achieved in February, was a breakthrough
in efforts to generate the extra $50bn (£20m) in aid pledged by the
G8 at last year’s Gleneagles summit.
More than 100 countries meeting in Paris agreed to look at new ways of funding
development to achieve UN goals of halving the number of people living on
less than $1 a day by 2015, cutting infant mortality rates by two-thirds and
providing primary education for every child.
The International Finance Facility scheme involves “frontloading”
development aid over the next decade.
A further working party will now look at the feasibility of the “live
now, pay later” scheme that could be funded through a tax on airline
passengers.
A pilot scheme has been successfully used to raise cash for immunisation.
In addition, Britain said it expected its spending of £1.5bn a year
on fighting HIV/Aids “to continue over the long term”. It also
supports the proposals from French President, Jacques Chirac, for an international
drug-purchasing facility; a scheme for bulk buying medicines for poor countries
at low cost.
EPF meet Euro partners in Spain
UKC
members represented the Ensuring Positive Futures (EPF) programme at the latest
Green Legged Chicken meeting in Badajoz, Spain. Six European partners from
the UK, Spain, Poland, Germany, Finland and France were represented and the
group visited two employment reinsertion projects co-funded under the Equal
programme. During the visit the group were also introduced to Guillermo Fernández
Vara, the Extramadura Minsiter of Health. Stephen Bitti, UKC chief executive
said: “The Equal programme enables EPF to share good practice with our
European colleagues and learn from their experiences.”
• www.glc-equal.org
• www.e-pf.org.uk
Caribbean facing HIV crisis
In the Caribbean, the region hardest hit in the world by HIV/Aids after sub-Saharan
Africa, Aids is now the primary cause of death among the 15-44 age group.
According to UNAIDS (UN Programme on HIV/Aids), 24,000 people died of Aids
in the Caribbean last year, and 300,000 are living with HIV.
However, only around 12 per cent of cases appear to involve gay men.
“Prejudice based on religious, social or other reasons are exacerbated
when HIV is thrown into the mix,” said Miriam Maluwa, representative
of UNAIDS for Jamaica, Cuba and the Bahamas. “This is one of the big
obstacles in the fight against Aids in the Caribbean and globally.”
“People are afraid to work with people living with HIV because they
don’t want to be lumped in together with them,” she continued.
Maluwa said some women in the region who had free access to antiretrovirals
failed to show up for treatment to avoid the stigma of being identified as
HIV positive.
She said Cuba had the smallest number of people living with HIV and the smallest
number of people dying from Aids-related illness. Despite HIV positive Cubans
reporting stigma, all had free access to antiretrovirals, and their jobs were
guaranteed.
However, she failed to mention how HIV positive people and gay men in the
late 1980s were imprisoned in Cuba and subsequently deported to the US. Incidence
of HIV/Aids in the Caribbean varies.
Average prevalence stands at around one per cent of the adult population in
the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Jamaica and Suriname; around two per cent
in the Bahamas, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and three per cent in Haiti. In
Cuba, prevalence is just 0.2 per cent.
The need to encourage cultural, social and legal changes and modify people’s
way of thinking is especially urgent given the fact there are Caribbean island
nations, like Jamaica, that still ban homosexual relations.
• See our feature, Closet of the Caribbean, pg 24, for full story
Gay games: fighting their own race with celebrity help
Openly
gay and HIV positive double-gold medal winner diver Greg Louganis (pictured
right) has joined celebrities like Sir Elton John and Billie Jean King to
promote the Chicago 2006 Gay Games. Louganis will co-host ‘A Night of
100 Champions’ at Chicago’s Soldier Fields at the end of April
to raise funds for the event.
Meanwhile, the first OutGames, a rival to the Chicago Gay Games, has announced
that tennis star Martina Navratilova will open its spectacle in Montreal on
29 July. Canada has announced it will place no extra visa restrictions on
HIV positive visitors to the OutGames or the subsequent Sixteenth International
Aids Conference to be held in Toronto from 13 to 18 August.
www.gaygames.com, www.gaygameschicago.org
www.montreal2006.org,
www.aids2006.org
Russian HIV epidemic hits mothers
and babies
Russia, together with the Ukraine, continues to have the largest Aids epidemic
in Europe, with 100 new infections every day, according to UNAIDS. This is
despite a promised 20-fold increase in the federal budget to fight Aids and
the prominence it has now assumed in President Putin’s agenda.
Among those hardest hit are mothers unaware of the treatments to prevent mother-to-child
transmission. Latest figures show 22,000 babies were born to HIV positive
mothers, and many of these are abandoned into the care of the state.
In the city of Tver, two of the four babies in the maternity ward should be
heading towards one of Russia’s regular baby orphanages, but instead
are likely to be stuck in the state-run infectious diseases hospital.
Abandoned by mothers too ashamed or unable to cope, they will be lucky if
their stay in the hospital isn’t longer than 18 months, the time it
takes in Russia for doctors to make a diagnosis of HIV in a child.
If they are found to be negative, the babies will be transferred to a children’s
orphanage; if they are positive, they will remain in hospital. This is despite
a law passed a year ago which obliges orphanages to accept HIV positive babies.
Yelena Vedmed, deputy head of the St Petersburg Hospital for Infectious Diseases,
said: “All the children that came here had problems. Many were locked
up for several years in isolated hospital wards.”
Vedmed has called for a massive public relations campaign to explain to Russians
that HIV positive people are no different from anyone else.
words
“Half of the world’s 40 million people with HIV and Aids live
in the Commonwealth. Ignorance and lack of understanding breeds uncertainty,
even fear. But someone who is HIV positive can lead a full and rewarding life”
Her Majesty the Queen speaks publicly about HIV and Aids for the first
time, from her Commonwealth Day address in Sydney
“The money once ring-fenced to tackle the HIV epidemic among gay
men has become scarce, and like crude oil, is becoming scarcer”
Dr Justin Varney, in a plenary speech to the CHAPS conference
“The Crown Prosecution Service is insisting on virological evidence
in each HIV criminalisation case”
Lisa Power, head of policy at THT, speaking at CHAPS
“No one knows the reality of the disease than the people who have
it. This applies whether it’s HIV or any kind of situation”
Sean Strub, founder of Poz magazine, criticising the absence of out
HIV positive people in care and advocacy groups
“The statistics for people who are HIV positive and latently infected
with TB are grim. In those with HIV, every year there’s a 10 per cent
chance of developing active TB”
Paul Thorn, writing in Gay Times
