BANGKOKNews (Updated
March 28, 2010)
[Home]
[Previous
news]
Sun Mar 28, 2010
BANGKOK
Complete entry bans on
HIV-positive visitors are in place in 11 countries, including Singapore and
China, while other restrictions including the refusal of residency rights remain
elsewhere, including Australia and New Zealand.
"There's no reason to
have these travel restrictions now, it's not based in public health rationale,
and they're depriving people of their basic rights," UNAIDS chief Michel
Sidibe said at an international meeting of lawmakers.
"We are calling for
global freedom of movement for people living with HIV," he said in the Thai
capital.
Sidibe said that many of
the countries had enacted laws restricting HIV-positive people during the 1980s,
when the newly discovered virus triggered mass panic.
But since then research on
the epidemic has shown that giving people with the virus freedom of movement
poses no hazard, he said.
The
The restrictions on
HIV-positive people "needlessly rob them of their dignity and equal
rights," said Theo-Ben Gurirab, president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
The assembly brought
together 680 lawmakers from 128 countries who backed the UN's call.
UNAIDS said its appeal on
travel restrictions was the beginning of a global advocacy campaign that would
target country leaders and mobilise civil society groups to act.
Mike Corder, Associated
Press Writer, On Wednesday March 24, 2010
Michel Kazatchkine,
executive director of the Geneva-based Global Fund, said he hoped to win pledges
of up to $20 billion over the next three years from national governments, but he
was concerned that the global economic meltdown could make rich countries scale
back their contributions.
More than 95 percent of
the fund's resources comes from countries' foreign aid budgets. Pledges for the
next three-year period will be made at an Oct. 5 conference at U.N.
headquarters.
"The preliminary
contacts we have been having with capitals particularly in
He said the fund's success
against the killer diseases since its launch eight years ago has shown it is
saving millions of lives.
"I feel the results
we are presenting are just incredible," he told The Associated Press at a
conference in
The Global Fund now helps
pay for AIDS treatment for 2.5 million people. A pledge of $20 million would
lift that figure to 7.5 million, he said.
In 2007, the group
trumpeted its distribution of 18 million anti-malaria mosquito nets. The number
has since risen to 105 million and the fund is now aiming for distributing 250
million nets.
He said the fund also aims
to reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis to 124 out of every 100,000 people in
2015, from 164 now, although he said the world was "clearly off track"
in its fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis.
There are nearly 9 million
new cases of TB worldwide and the disease kills more than 1.5 million people
every year, according to the World Health Organization.
TB can be cured with a
six-month course of antibiotics that costs only $20, but WHO said about 4
percent of all TB cases worldwide are thought to be non-responsive to the usual
drugs.
Michel Sidibe, head of the
U.N. AIDS program, warned Wednesday that double infections of HIV and TB could
become the next new epidemic.
A person whose immune
system is compromised by HIV is particularly susceptible to tuberculosis, which
is caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs. The disease is spread
through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
"I'm calling for
serious attention to TB, and serious attention to TB-HIV co-infection,"
Sidibe said in the African nation of
Associated Press writer
Nastasya Tay contributed to this report from
Mon Mar 22, 2010
"Due to doctors'
negligence 147 children in
"By January 2009,
when an investigation was complete and its findings made its way to court, 14 of
those children were dead," the website said.
Twelve medical staff from
"The mass outbreak
was due to using catheters and syringes many times without sterilisation,
falsification of sterilisation notifications and destruction of proper
documents," the report said.
Official statistics list
nearly 13,000 HIV cases in
Mar 22, 2010
MANILA
Although the WHO statement
did not mention the church by name, its statement directly contradicted bishops'
recent claims that condoms are too porous and do not work in preventing the
spread of infection.
Dr Massimo Ghidinelli, the
WHO's regional adviser on HIV-AIDS, said the WHO statement was "intended to
clarify some of these regularly returning questions and doubts about the
effectiveness of condoms."
He said these doubts and
questions were raised as part of a "wave of criticism and opposition to
condoms," apparently referring to the church's anti-condom campaign.
Catholic bishops, whose
church claims over 80 percent of Filipinos as its followers, have been attacking
the government openly after health officials distributed free condoms to mark
Valentine's Day.
"Given its high
failure rate, the condom cannot really put a stop to AIDS. Moreover, by creating
a false sense of security, it... contributes to the further spread of
AIDS," the bishops said.
Ghidinelli told AFP that
claims made in the bishops' statement were "not correct and the message
given to the public is not based on available evidence."
Without naming the church,
he stressed that the benefit of condoms in preventing the spread of
sexually-transmitted diseases had been scientifically confirmed.
The WHO statement also
warned that HIV-AIDS was a "growing concern" in the
Sexual intercourse was the
main mode of HIV transmission, it said.
28 Mar 2010
Source: Reuters
*
Economic slowdown increases vulnerability
* Virus spreading in
central
* UNAIDS wants travel bans
on HIV patients scrapped
By Thin Lei Win
BANGKOK, March 28
(Reuters) - Economic crisis and climate change concerns could affect the fight
against the AIDS virus and lead to a "universal nightmare", the head
of the United Nations' agency for HIV/AIDS said on Sunday.
The global economic
downturn has brought about greater inequality and could increase vulnerability
and fuel the epidemic, said Michele Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS.
About 33.4 million people
worldwide are infected with HIV and the AIDS virus. Since AIDS emerged in the
1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected and 25 million have died.
"This is no time to
stop. If we stop helping those people, the majority of whom are coming from the
poorest segment of society, what we will face is a universal nightmare," he
said in an interview.
Sidibe was attending a
meeting in
He urged governments
facing budgetary restraints not to reduce funding for HIV treatment and
prevention.
Sidibe countered criticism
that the focus on HIV/AIDS had led to a neglect of other fatal diseases, saying
that the agency was working to integrate programmes for both HIV and
tuberculosis, which is a common cause of death in HIV patients.
NEW POPULATIONS INFECTED
Since HIV was discovered,
significant progress has been made. New infections have fallen 17 percent in the
past eight years, over four million people now receive necessary treatment.
A recent report by the
Global Fund, a multi-donor initiative fighting HIV, malaria and tuberculosis,
said the elimination of mother-to-child transmission is within reach by 2015.
However, Sidibe said the
virus was making inroads into new populations and areas. According to UNAIDS,
for every two people put on treatment, five are newly infected.
He said Africa remains the
worst affected but there is growing concern about other parts of the world,
especially eastern Europe and central
Around 70 percent of new
infections occurring in those regions were drug users with no access to services
because they are considered criminals, Sidibe said.
In
Sidibe said all possible
tools, from condoms to circumcision, needed to be used and support from big
pharmaceutical companies was essential.
"We need to
renegotiate how we can have pharmaceutical firms engaged in a process which can
help us to have more sample drugs and better quality first-line treatment,"
he said.
(Editing by Martin Petty)
By MIKE CORDER, Associated
Press Writer Mar 23, 2010
Representatives of some 40
religions and faith groups including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and
Buddhism ended a two-day retreat in the
Canon Gideon Byamugisha,
an Anglican priest from
"They reacted with
support and understanding," he said in a telephone interview. "There
were sections who were annoyed and disappointed I was HIV positive, but a big
number opted to give me the love, care and support I needed."
Byamugisha lost his first
wife to AIDS and has since remarried to a woman with HIV. He told church
officials in 1992 that he had HIV and was one of the first African clerics to
reveal he had the disease.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the
United Nations Population Fund's executive director, called Tuesday's statement
"a sea change."
"There is no talk
about sinning or repentance," she said. "It is more about acceptance
of people living with HIV."
The delegates acknowledged
that some church and faith groups had played an active role in the
stigmatization they now have committed to end.
"With remorse we
regret that those living with HIV have at times been at the receiving end of
judgment, rejection ... ," they wrote in a statement. "We need to make
greater efforts to ensure that all people living with HIV find a welcome within
faith communities."
The statement came after
two days of discussions in which Byamugisha said that delegates sometimes
struggled "with how to balance between communicating the religious messages
that talk about morality and spirituality (and) public health challenges on the
ground."
The use of condoms to
fight the spread of HIV infections also was discussed, but only as a side issue,
Byamugisha said.
A year ago, Pope Benedict
XVI drew unprecedented criticism when he said that distributing condoms was not
the answer to
He said a moral attitude
toward sex — abstinence and marital fidelity — would help fight the disease.
Rev. Richard Fee of the
Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, which helped organized the meeting, said that
religious groups can now join the front line in battling AIDS and HIV.
"If we are going to
deal with this pandemic, the way we are going to get the message to every
village in the world through education is through faith based groups which do
touch every village in the world," he said.