G8 AIDS pledge 'hanging in the balance'

SciDev.Net | Africa Action | United Nations Children's Fund

STOP AIDS CAMPAIGN

Campaigners warned today that the upcoming G8 summit in St Petersburg will fail millions of people living with HIV and Aids around the world if there is backsliding on the 2005 Gleneagles Summit's pledge to deliver universal access to AIDS treatment and care.

Following the failure of the meeting in Durban to commit proper funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria, the UK's Stop AIDS Campaign is calling on the G8 leaders to ensure that last year's historic commitment by the G8 is realised.

The Stop Aids Campaign says that:

One year on from Gleneagles, overall funding for HIV and AIDS programmes is still a little over half what is needed. Only 1.3 million of the 6.5 million people who need antiretroviral medicines are receiving them, very few of them children.

£10-12 billion annually is needed to achieve universal access by 2010 (source: UNAIDS). Current estimates are that only £4.88 billion will be available in 2006.

It is estimated that 1 million additional health care workers are required in Africa to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and build the infrastructure to deliver HIV treatment, testing, care and prevention services.

"The G8's commitment to HIV treatment will be the elephant in their room in St Petersburg. G8 leaders made much political capital from their pledge, but the political will to deliver appears to have slipped. Developing country governments need substantial support to overcome the legal, procedural and political barriers to affordable generic versions of expensive patented medicines," said SAC spokesperson, Simon Wright. "As treatment for HIV and AIDS is a life-long medical intervention, patients all over the world deserve to profit equally from medical progress."

The G8 must help to close the funding gap; however, a meeting in Durban earlier this month failed to put sufficient funding in the Global Fund to meet this target. Further, the UN High Level Meeting in June this year failed even to acknowledge that particular groups are especially vulnerable to the disease.