HIV and AIDS
The global fight against HIV and AIDS is one of the world’s highest development priorities, recognising the enormous suffering the pandemic causes, as well as the threat it poses to the achievement of other MDGs. In 2005 at the G8 Gleneagles summit, world leaders in committed a target for achieving universal access to HIV treatment by 2010. Later that year at the World Summit, world leaders also committed themselves to this target as part of a massive scaling up of HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment and care.
Currently only 1.3 million people in the developing world are receiving antiretrovirals out of a total of 6.5 million who need them urgently. Less than 5% of the estimated 700,000 HIV positive children in need of paediatric AIDS treatment are receiving it – and most of those are in developed countries. Unfair trade rules are preventing cheaper generic drugs becoming available and are pricing out the poor. The central challenge is to overcome the obstacles to scaling up prevention, treatment, care and support by providing sufficient and sustainable financing for universal access, ensuring affordable medicines and strengthening health systems.
Micah Challenge calls on the G8 to:
- Adoption an international agreement on a funding plan that will deliver sufficient funding to achieve the 2005 commitment to universal access; mapping out how donor countries plan to urgently increase revenue and channel additional money to fully fund national targets.
- Work towards ensuring every nationally agreed target is financed in full with predictable, untied funding, aligned to national priorities and free from conditions beyond those necessary to fully fund all national targets.
- Ensure that generic versions of two essential antiretrovirals: marketed as Viread and Kaletra, are made available to developing countries in 2007.
- Work towards ensuring new and affordable generic versions of all other essential medicines become rapidly and widely available.
- Ensure that child-specific HIV treatment targets are explicitly included in broader national and international treatment targets.
- Ensure that all children living with HIV have access to anti-retroviral therapy as appropriate and to cotrimoxazole preventive treatment as standard according to WHO Guidelines.
- Ensure that all HIV positive women have access to appropriate interventions to prevent mother-to-child transmission, including new and more effective medicines.
