ONE member and Peace Corps volunteer Brandon Green will be sharing his experiences in Burkina Faso with ONE Blog readers in the series, “Back to Africa” over the next few months. We look forward to hearing about all his adventures!
Me and my students at our HIV/AIDS talk
At one of my English Clubs — a place for students to practice their English — last Tuesday, 140 7th and 8th graders crammed into a classroom that shouldn’t be able to hold more than a third of them. They were there to learn a few English words and watch the American put a condom on a wooden penis. I was there to teach them about HIV/AIDS. The class started by discussing what HIV/AIDS is and how it affects the human body. Then, I showed them some statistics about people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. I told them that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of infections, and that 1.2 percent of the population of Burkina Faso is currently living with HIV/AIDS.
Life happens here at the Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Babies trade a death sentence for life. Mothers transform their sickly skeleton figures to healthy, able bodies. Tema offers hope in a place that was once hopeless and ravaged by AIDS.
Funded by the Global Fund through financial support from Product (RED), Tema Hospital cares for 2,200 people living with HIV. We recently visited their facility again –- their work never ceases to amaze me. The Global Fund make it possible for the hospital to provide ARV treatment and PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child-transmission). Thanks to these interventions, only 4 percent of babies at Tema with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus.
Last week, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) celebrated the transition of Project HEART to local partners, after eight years of putting hundreds of thousands of patients on life-saving ARV treatment.
Kevin Kouassi, Community HIV Counselor from Dimbokro, Cote d’Ivoire, and Project HEART beneficiary, counsels a young pregnant woman about prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV services. (Photo: Olivier Asselin)
Project HEART was launched in 2004 in partnership with the CDC and PEPFAR to scale up access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services in Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. As of September 2011, Project HEART has enrolled more than 1 million people in HIV care programs (including 80,000 children), provided antiretroviral treatment for more than 560,000 patients, and tested and counseled more than 2.5 million pregnant women.
In celebration of the Global Fund’s 10th anniversary, ONE Global Health Policy Manager Erin Hohlfelder reflects on the organization’s accomplishments over the years.
When I was ten, I was busy doing important things like mastering long division, practicing softball and rocking the plastic glasses/bowl cut combo. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, I have to say I’m even more proud today to honor all the incredible things that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has achieved in its first ten years of existence. To understand the Global Fund’s impact, it’s important to remember just how bad things were before it existed: Fewer than 50,000 Africans had access to AIDS treatment. Malaria was killing nearly 1 million people annually. Treating TB was considered too expensive for most of the developing world.
Each day this week, we’ll highlight a major accomplishment in the fight against poverty that ONE members helped achieve in 2011. Today, ONE’s US Deputy Director for New Media Garth Moore discusses our World AIDS Day campaign.
Last summer, new scientific studies pointed to a tantalizing possibility: The Beginning of the End of AIDS. What could that have meant? A horrible disease that has taken millions of lives could be on the downhill thanks to advancements and lower costs for treatment and prevention. Suddenly, villages and communities where AIDS was once a death sentence could be kept healthy and avoid getting HIV in the first place through stopping mother-to-child transmission and more preventive methods. When ONE, (RED) and other partners combined forces to push US leaders to scale up treatment and prevention, we recognized this wasn’t a pipe dream, but a serious call to action.
Surrounded by red AIDS ribbons projected on the nearby university center, old municipal building and historic Statler Hilton, local businesses, community groups and residents gathered in downtown Dallas’ Main Street Gardens on Thursday evening, December 1, to observe World AIDS Day 2011 and to commemorate 30 years of fighting against the spread of HIV/AIDS. In support of the United Nations’ “getting to zero” campaign, event organizers brought that fight to the local level with the message, “Whether or not you are infected, we are all affected by HIV/AIDS.”
Rachel Wilson, senior director of advocacy and public policy at PATH, explains why supporting foreign assistance not only saves and improves lives, but also improves morale here at home.
Rachel’s quilt patch
This year, I commemorated World AIDS Day at ONE and (RED)’s event in Washington, DC, where I listened to sitting and past presidents, members of Congress, corporate leaders, health workers from other countries, activists and even a few rockstars. At a time when every government cent is under scrutiny, I was reminded of just how far we have come in the fight against AIDS and many other diseases that disproportionately affect the developing world. I left the event feeling energized by the significant progress we have made and the leadership that has been shown by the US in addressing so many global health problems.
It wasn’t until I returned to my office and saw an email from a dear friend, who had chosen to stop taking the medication that is no longer protecting him against an ever-growing list of AIDS-related complications, that I was brought crashing back to reality. This juxtaposition between a community’s accomplishment and personal tragedy gave me pause. To be sure, we are winning the war against AIDS; but we also have a long way to go before we can declare victory.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
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