Opinion Pieces- World AIDS Day - December 1, 2001

HIV/AIDS - and Hepatitis C, in Australia

With World AIDS Day (Dec 1) here again and, despite being 20 years into the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, Australia still remains very much the odd man out in terms of its infection rates compared with the rest of the world.

Less than 13,000 people are presently living with HIV in Australia (and 2,600 with AIDS) compared to the horrendous and soaring global figure of over 36 million, almost half of them women.

Worldwide, AIDS has killed almost 22 million people, 9 million of them women and over 4 million children.

Australia's cumulative death toll from AIDS is nudging six thousand.

Of the 40 million globally infected, ninety-five percent of people with HIV live in the developing world, over seven million (or 20 percent) in the Asian Pacific area ... our own geographical neighbourhood.

Three thousand people are infected with HIV in the Asian Pacific every day, compared to 450 infected in Australia for a whole year.

Devastated by the global figures, I commissioned the production of the world's first "cause" rose last year for people living with HIV/AIDS: a global fundraiser appropriately named "Hope"... an awareness companion to the Red Ribbon.

As the founder of The Australian AIDS Fund, a charity that's cared for positive people for 16 years, I've been acutely aware of discrimination as one of the most hateful aspects of living with HIV/AIDS.

Now, I'm increasingly concerned that people with Hepatitis C are being confronted by that same discrimination. They now number over 200,000 in Australia and their number grows by over 200 a week.

Surely it's time now to untie that awkward political knot that binds HIV/AIDS and links Hepatitis C and HIV like twins...Admittedly, there are some benefits, but Hep C's political voice is that of a dwarf compared with its HIV/AIDS counterpart and the Hep C infection rate is rightfully regarded as the runaway threat to the Australian health system.

Are the Hep C fighters and their infected getting what they need in terms of research funding, care support and education? That assurance is vital.

And should the myth that Hep C is a related disease be allowed to continue? Don't those with Hep C carry a heavy enough burden already?

This year's World AIDS Day theme is "I care ... do you?".

Let's also start applying that to the more than 200,000 in Australia trying to live with Hepatitis C.

Brian Haill
Director, AIDS Information Services
Email: haill@labyrinth.net.au

HIV/AIDS ... the global appeal

The following are edited highlights of the World AIDS Day message issued by Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations:

Every day more than 8,000 people die of AIDS. Every hour almost 600 people become infected. Every minute a child dies of the virus. Just as life - and death - goes on after September 11, so must we continue our fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Before the terrorist attacks two months ago, tremendous momentum had been achieved in that fight. To lose it now would be to compound one tragedy with another.

New figures, released in advance of today's World AIDS Day, show that more than 40 million people are now living with the virus. The vast majority of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the devastation is so acute that it has become one of the main obstacles to development. But parts of the > Caribbean and Asia are not far behind, and the pandemic is spreading at an alarming rate in Eastern Europe.

In a growing number of countries, effective prevention campaigns have been launched. There has been an increasing recognition, among both donors and the most affected countries, of the link between prevention and treatment. There has also been a new understanding of the particular toll AIDS is taking on women.

The entire United Nations family is engaged in this fight, working to a common strategic plan and supporting national, regional and global efforts through our joint program, UNAIDS. Perhaps most important, a new awareness and commitment have taken hold among governments - most notably in Africa.

Last June the membership of the UN met in a special session of the General Assembly to devise a comprehensive, coordinated global response to the AIDS crisis. They adopted a powerful declaration of commitments, calling for a fundamental shift in our response to HIV/AIDS as a global economic, social and development change.

They reaffirmed the pledge, made by world leaders in their UN Millenium Declaration, to halt and begin to reverse the spread of AIDS by 2015.

We have the road map, the tools and the knowledge to fight AIDS. What we must sustain now is the political will. Life after September 11 has made us all think more deeply about the kind of world we want for our children.

It is the same world we wanted on September 10 - a world in which a child does not die of AIDS every minute.

This website is for YOUR benefit as an ongoing AIDS AWARENESS PROJECT resource reference guide. The easiest of all to find.

It's the only one of its kind; tracking the pandemic as it continues its devastating, ravaging, tidal sweep across the globe bringing you the humanity behind the mind-numbing raw figures.the tragedies, the appalling losses, the implications, the endeavours and the triumphs.the ongoing struggle against both the stigma and the discrimination.

In just 20 years since 1981, the AIDS pandemic has scourged the world as the 20th century plague, making modern day lepers of almost 60 million people, and, as the experts warn, the worst is yet to come. 36 million men, women and children are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and 22 million others have already lost their lives.

UNAIDS chief, Peter Piot, says (June, 2001) that the pandemic is only really just getting under way.with Asia, West Africa and Eastern Europe poised to fall victim in huge numbers.