UN says battle being won against HIV/AIDS in region

MIAMI, USA (CMC) - The United Nations says the battle against HIV/AIDS is being won in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Michael Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations programme established to tackle the pandemic, said a "major, major breakthrough has been made during the last five years of increasing the coverage of treatment" for HIV/AIDS in the region.

"In the Caribbean and Latin America, governments and health system are responding quickly, and the number of people who need treatment was not so high compared to the rest of the world," he told reporters in Miami.

"The Caribbean was the first region in the world to negotiate a reduction of the price of drugs for treatment, which made a big difference in increasing coverage," he added.

Sidibe acknowledged that the region has 62 per cent antiretroviral therapy coverage, the highest of any region in the world.

He, however, said the region's biggest epidemics are in countries with the largest populations, adding that the problem is mainly access to the slums.

"We didn't have a strategy in the early days to be able to penetrate the slums and organise proper outreach services, which could help young people with necessary information and helping them to be able to protect themselves," he said.

"In terms of accessing services and ensuring continuity of services, it was also difficult, given the violence [and] poverty levels," he added.

The UNAIDS spokesman said fear was one of the major challenges facing the region, stating: "People are really scared to be discriminated (against), to be stigmatised and lose their job.

"That's a way of also being excluded from communities and not being part of transformation of their societies as normal human beings," he said.

"Our major challenge today is punitive laws and practices that are not really giving space or access to services for vulnerable communities like homosexuals, sex workers and drug users," he added.

Sidibe said while there are hopeful signs in battling HIV/AIDS in Haiti, for example, the French-speaking Caribbean country is "very paradoxical because it's always the same".

"You have a major challenge with governance, you have a major challenge with economic stability and growing poverty," he said.

"But, at the same time, it's a country that has been able to demonstrate a different type of solidarity by using alternative service delivery systems to reduce the number of new infections," he added.

"It's a real interesting case because it's a place where most of the indicators were not necessarily the most encouraging ones, and you have AIDS showing that now you have an alternative approach that has been working".

He said while he was yet to visit the Caribbean he had held a meeting with the ministers of health three weeks ago, stating that a sub-regional vision emerged from that meeting.

"This vision could really help to make sure that they eliminate completely the vertical transmission from mother to child," he said.

Although the region is said to be second only to sub-Saharan Africa in terms of the prevalence of the disease, he believes "the Caribbean can be the first region in the world to show that they achieved universal access on treatment.

"It's also important for them to have the difficult debate around punitive laws," Sidibe said.
"We can have a different point of view, but I don't think it's right to consider someone who has a different point of view a criminal."

Sidibe lamented that more than 80 countries still have laws that criminalise homosexuality and people due to their status.