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Achieving targets to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and halve tuberculosis rates hang in the balance as donor commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Fund come up for review. For the past seven years, the Geneva-based Global Fund has made some of the largest contributions to health aid in history, said the Fund's executive director, Michel Kazatchkine. International donors will meet in October 2010 to decide whether, and how much money, they will give the international financing organization. Kazatchkine said progress so far had put the world on track to reaching important health milestones by 2015, but reaching these goals would depend on renewed funding.

"The next replenishment will be absolutely key to where the world will be in 2015. If we continue to scale up we should be able to reach or surpass some of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), such as containing the spread of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), and virtually eliminating mother-to-child transmission by 2015," Kazatchkine told IRIN/PlusNews.
UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe agreed. "Without a fully-funded Global Fund, our shared dreams of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support could become our worst nightmare, putting the lives of millions currently on treatment in jeopardy."
The October replenishment meeting comes at a time when donors like the United States and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) have backed away from increasing their HIV funding commitments. The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) contributes one-third of all Global Fund monies.

A new 126-page report, "The Global Fund 2010: Innovation and Impact", released this week, details progress made by Fund-suported programmes, including increased access to antiretrovirals (ARVs), improved TB cure rates, and reduced levels of AIDS-related mortality and new HIV infections.

Background story: http://www.worldcarecouncil.org/content/cambodia-un-should-review-role-d...

UNICEF must do more to oppose Cambodia’s involuntary rehab centres, comment by Joe Amon

My 8-year-old son was understandably confused earlier this month. He was sitting in my lap as I read news that the United Nations agency responsible for protecting children’s rights was being criticised for supporting Cambodian detention centres where children are subject to arbitrary detention, torture, violent beatings and other sadistic punishments. “UNICEF is torturing kids, Dad?” he asked.
Investigations by Human Rights Watch had uncovered widespread and serious abuses in Cambodia’s drug detention centres, including a “youth rehabilitation” centre run by the Ministry of Social Affairs. The news accounts were critical of UNICEF’s support for the ministry and for the youth centre at Choam Chao. UNICEF’s Cambodia office was vague and equivocal in response to the reports of torture and abuse, but no, I told my son, UNICEF was not torturing kids.

International Womens Day 2010

From Debora Patta in SA: I am sick and tired of people using culture to defend practices which quite frankly are outdated, sexist and degrade women. Polygamy may be legal in South Africa but that doesn't make it right. Culture is not static - hopefully as we progress as a nation, we evolve. We know for example that apartheid was built on patriarchy and racism. We know that the homeland system was evil even though some black people were complicit in defending it. And likewise we should know that polygamy is a system where men rule supreme and have power over the women they collect. Just because it is an age old cultural practice, doesn't make it a good cultural practice. President Jacob Zuma's defense of polygamy was shattered after revelations that he fathered a love-child with the daughter of another close friend. It's not an ancient cultural practice that he is upholding, but rather his right to bed as many women as he pleases regardless of the consequences.

Patients Charter for TB Care

I'm over-joyed to see all these posts expressing interest in addressing rights issues and improving care for DR-TB patients. Yes yes yes, I agree. I know firsthand that this is very needed and very overdue. Reading the comments that call for the Patients' Charter to be better promoted and implemented is uplifting, as I have often thought that the PCTC could be a powerful organizing tool for patients and many progressive partners, driven forward dynamically with a planned roll-out adequately funded. Shamefully, this has not happened, and all of us who had contributed to the original are deeply dismayed by the lack of progress. However, when I read all these comments of the last few days, I'm excited again, and an old expression comes to mind which sums-up my feelings : " Don't Moan, Organize !! "
Instead of just citing examples of rights abuses, dignity denied, and casting blame on vague faceless authorities at the top, we should collectively work pragmatically to develop a practical model for the promotion of the Patients' Charter in MDR treatment centers. Although many of the comrade's comments highlight the need for PCTC promotion across all TB programs, I think we could, and should, first strive to have a ground-breaking impact specifically on MDR and XDR programs — exactly where Rights are most commonly denied and death the most likely outcome. Together, we might be able to organize change.

Although this article by Drs Joseph Amon, Françoise Girard, and Salmaan Keshavjee, and the WHO reply, are very well written and may help to raise awareness of a nasty extreme of MDR TB Control, I see with interest the other comments on the general rights situation of DR-TB patients. I think this is the area that needs to be directly addressed in priority. The ethical/judicial question of forced confinement is just one aspect, whereas the shameful way millions of people with TB are dealt with by most TB programs is where broad discussion and urgent intervention is needed. To speak of 'limitations' is not accurate, the discourse should be about violations of human rights.

(I found this paper on MDR-TB - it's interesting and important.)
Recent attention to multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR- and XDR-TB) has increased discussion and debate over the extent to which limitations to human rights can be justified in the name of public health. In their recent article “Limitations on human rights: Are they justifiable to reduce the burden of TB in the era of MDR- and XDR-TB?” Andrea Boggio et al. argue that involuntary treatment and other compulsory measures for patients with tuberculosis (TB) can be justified as a “last resort” under international human rights law, particularly the Siracusa Principles. Although there is little international disagreement with this position in theory, in practice TB policies that limit individual freedoms and restrict rights are not always determined on an individual basis or as a “last resort.” Particularly in the case of drug-resistant TB, some countries have adopted rights-limiting measures before offering appropriate and proven programmatic interventions that respect human rights.

The UN programme on HIV/Aids says HIV has become the leading cause of death and disease among women of reproductive age worldwide. At the start of a ten-day conference in New York, UNAids launched a five-year action plan addressing the gender issues which put women at risk. One of the key issues, it says, is that up to 70% of women worldwide have been forced to have unprotected sex. UNAids says such violence against women must not be tolerated. "By robbing them of their dignity, we are losing the opportunity to tap half the potential of mankind to achieve the Millennium Development Goals," said Executive Director Michel Sidibe.

With help from scientists from Stanford University’s medical school, North Korea has developed its first laboratory capable of detecting drug-resistant tuberculosis, scientists involved in the project said last week. Tuberculosis surged in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during the famines of the 1990s. (Starvation suppresses the immune system, allowing latent infections to grow.) But the country cannot tell which cases are susceptible to which antibiotics, meaning more dangerous strains could push out strains that are easier to kill, as has happened in Russia and Peru.

Scaling down HIV requires scaling up human rights, testing and treatment
To the participants at the WHO consultation on ART as HIV prevention:
We, the undersigned organizations, are encouraged by emerging evidence that ART may be an effective means of reducing HIV incidence and applaud the attention of WHO and UNAIDS to identifying scientifically sound and innovative ways to accelerate progress toward universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services. We appreciate that exploration of ART as prevention is being undertaken with that crucial goal in mind, including significant gains in increasing the number of people who know their status and, if positive, have timely access to treatment.

An AIDS activist in Uzbekistan has been sentenced to seven years in prison for writing a brochure that authorities said would promote antisocial behaviour, activists said Thursday. Maxim Popov was convicted last September, his colleagues told AFP, but his case only came to light this week after US-based watchdog Human Rights Watch asked local activists to investigate his situation. "Maxim Popov was convicted for writing a brochure which was funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and UNICEF as an effort by international donor organisations to raise awareness about the disease in the country," said an AIDS activist who worked with Popov.