Twenty years ago, the sight of women, men and children being carried to hospitals in wheelbarrows as they clung to the fragile threads of life, was heartbreakingly common. AIDS was not just a disease. It was a shadow of despair that loomed over our communities, threatening to engulf us in darkness. But then, in a […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported drug resistance to the world’s gold-standard antiretroviral medicine, dolutegravir “exceeding levels observed in clinical trials” – with resistance ranging from 3.9% to 19.6%. This was potentially very bad news as dolutegravir has been the recommended first- and second-line HIV treatment for all population groups since 2018 – but […] Continue reading ->
In January, Ugandan LGBTQ activist Steven Kabuye was stabbed multiple times by two men travelling on a motorbike and left for dead on the outskirts of Kampala, the country’s capital city. The 25-year-old, who had received several death threats after Uganda’s Parliament passed its Anti-Homosexuality Act last May, criminalising LGBTQ people, said that the attackers […] Continue reading ->
I endured a dreary weekend in a Paris hotel while others rushed home. As the junior English speaker of a task force of United Nations (UN) member states, it fell to me to finalise our report. It was the early 1990s and we had travelled across Asia, Africa and Latin America collating confusing evidence and […] Continue reading ->
As donors withdraw from HIV, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has chosen to focus on the importance of community-led interventions to end the AIDS pandemic for World AIDS Day on 1 December. “There has been an unprecedented backsliding in financial commitments to community-led organisations, and it is costing lives,” according to UNAIDS […] Continue reading ->
Two-thirds of countries no longer criminalise consensual same-sex sex, a “remarkable reversal” since the start of the AIDS pandemic that has enabled global progress against the spread of HIV. This is a key finding of Progress and the Peril, a report on HIV and decriminalisation released this week by Georgetown University’s Global HIV Policy Lab. […] Continue reading ->
On the morning of October 10, 2022, Russia launched a barrage of over 100 cruise missiles and suicide drones at Ukraine’s power grid and water supply, striking civilian areas across the country. One of the first targets hit were the streets around Kyiv City Clinical Hospital 5, a medical facility with hundreds of beds in […] Continue reading ->
The failure of the US Congress to reauthorise a five-year budget for the world’s largest aid programme for global health, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), by its 30 September deadline doesn’t mean that it will automatically end – but without broad bipartisan support, it limps into an uncertain future. “In the […] Continue reading ->
Most of the $500 million in US support for Uganda’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, financed by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), is likely to go ahead next month despite the country’s draconian new Anti-Homosexuality Act, according to sources close to the process. However, it is still possible that some parts of the PEPFAR […] Continue reading ->
Despite the giant strides the world has made in combating the HIV epidemic, the high rate of infections among women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as childhood HIV infections, continue to hamper progress. “Four thousand adolescent girls and young women acquired HIV every single week. That’s a crisis every single week. 3,100 of […] Continue reading ->