Aids 2010 begins

The 18th International AIDS Conference has begun and with it much discussion around this year’s theme: Rights Here, Right Now.

As you may have heard, the main aim is to start increasing access to anti-retrovirals (ARVs). When the last conference was held in 2008, around 42% of the 9.5 million people in low- and middle-income countries who needed treatment had access to ARVs. But 10 million people still didn’t.

The World Health Organization’s latest figures show “5.2 million people in low and middle-income countries were receiving life-saving HIV treatment at the end of 2009.” So – in spite of those still lacking treatment – the stats seem to be going in the right direction.

But there are still issues around access to ARVs -  societal ones. The Director of the Instititute of Human Virology in Nigeria, Dr. Patrick Dakum, told the BBC World Service the way ARVs are distributed often eliminates the “marginalsied population” like homosexuals and prostitutes who really need them. He says it’s time to “differentiate between science and morality…irrespective of practices we might not agree with.”

The Aids 2010 Objectives plans to tackle this problem: “It is now absolutely clear that stigma, discrimination and rights violations…as well as punitive or misguided policies towards key populations most affected by HIV, are major obstacles to an effective response to HIV.”

The conference will also have to address the 2010 deadline for universal access set by world leaders at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2008. A committment was made to ‘develop and implement a package for HIV  prevention, treatment and care, with the aim of as close as possible to universal access to treatment for all those who need it by 2010′

People like Evelyn Similoi – a single mother who was raped after finding out she was HIV Positive – need this deadline to be met. She told the BBC there needs to be more transparency from the organisations providing ARVs. Evelyn doesn’t and can’t take ARVs herself because she reacts badly but says she and her son “survive by god’s grace.”

Narrowing the gap between equality and discrimination will take more than goal-setting at the conference, regardless of its status as a crucial fixture in the global problem-solving calendar. Ideologies need challenging and mindsets need changing.

As Dr. Brigitte Schmied, President of the Austrian AIDS Society and AIDS 2010 Local Co-Chair, said in her opening speech last night, this can only be helped by “repealing laws that criminalize homosexuality and addiction, and empowering and educating young women and girls.”

She also said: “we have shown the skeptics that universal access is achievable; that it is a goal we can – and must – reach.” With 5 and a half months to go before we reach 2011, the next few days at Aids 2010 will determine whether she’s right.

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