Friday, April 25, 2008
less than two months, government officials and AIDS activists from
around the world will convene in New York to review the global HIV/AIDS
National progress reports,
submitted earlier this year, will be compared to targets adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) in
Based on a review of the reports from Eastern and
Southern Africa, the regions worst affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis,
experts from UNAIDS have already concluded that despite significant
progress in areas such as treatment, many of the UNGASS goals are still
far from being reached.
"The data presented by countries
confirms that overall the rate of progress in expanding access to all
services is failing to keep pace with the expansion of the epidemic in
this region," said Mark Stirling, director of UNAIDS for Eastern and
Countries were asked to provide data on 25
core indicators designed to track progress on a number of fronts,
including HIV prevalence, education, provision of antiretroviral
treatment (ART), uptake of condoms, and assistance to orphans.
the area of prevention, described in the 2001 document as the "mainstay
of the response", progress has been particularly disappointing, with
some countries even documenting a backward slide since the last round
of reporting in 2006.
Zambia, Uganda, Rwanda and Angola
reported declines in condom use between 2005 and 2007, while the uptake
of services to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission decreased in
Angola, Tanzania and Zambia.
Children still accounted for one
in six of new HIV infections globally in 2007, according to UNAIDS.
Although some countries in the region saw a decrease in HIV prevalence
among people aged 15 to 24 - the age group that provides the best
indication of new adult infections - others saw no change or slight
In 11 countries with high HIV prevalence that
recently conducted surveys, only about 15 percent of orphans were
living in households that received some form of medical, financial or
psychosocial assistance - an increase of just 5 percent from 2005.
the discouraging trends reported by some countries, Andy Seale, a
regional advisor with UNAIDS, emphasised the importance of looking at
figures in the context of the background detail supplied in the
Many countries struggled to pull together data for
all 25 indicators. "It's very difficult for some of them to align their
monitoring and evaluation mechanisms with what we're asking for," Seale
noted, adding that the reports did not rely solely on government
"We've made a big effort to ensure they're national
reports, not just government ones; I think we can be reasonably
confidant about the data," he told IRIN/PlusNews.
Africa's country report claimed that no data was available for 17 of
the 25 indicators, in many cases because surveys were only conducted
every five years.
The UNAIDS summary recognised the
"extraordinary" increases in treatment coverage in countries such as
Rwanda, where 60 percent of people in need of ART were receiving it by
2007, compared to one percent in 2003. An estimated three million
people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving ARVs by the
end of 2007, a 50 percent increase since December 2006.
around this year's UNGASS meeting in New York are likely to be
influenced by what many described as a disappointing outcome from the
last meeting, in June 2006.
An attempt to reach consensus between countries with conflicting
attitudes and priorities resulted in a declaration that most civil
society groups regarded as weak and lacking targets.
Msimang, HIV/AIDS programme manager at the Open Society Initiative for
Southern Africa (OSISA), which was highly involved in an international
effort to support organisations to go to New York in 2006, said her
organisation would be scaling down its efforts for this year's meeting.
"It remains important that African actors and their voices are
represented in these spaces and fora - we just don't expect as much as
we would have in the past," Msimang wrote in an emailed response to
questions from IRIN/PlusNews. "A lot of our resources are going towards
longer-term processes ... Civil society has been burned too many times
with these big global events, and I am not sure how much more we can
get out of them."
the area of prevention, a number of AIDS organisations are now
questioning the usefulness of short-term targets like those set by
UNGASS, and shifting their efforts towards strategies with an extended
timeframe that focus on the social and cultural factors driving the
"I think the short-term targets were set
when people were coming to terms with AIDS as a major epidemic;
understandably, people were keen to treat it as an emergency," said
Seale of UNAIDS. "We still need to do that, but there's a lot of
impetus now to look at longer-term models."
meeting will dispense with the declaration and instead produce an
"outcome document" that simply reports on the sessions.
insisted that the event would still provide important opportunities for
cross-country learning, for strengthening links between donors and
beneficiaries, and for providing "that extra bit of pressure on
countries, to make sure they are tracking this data and inviting
Source: PLUS NEWS http://plusnews.org