ACW Statement 3: An achievable future

Reaching for the ultimate goal of universal access to ARV drugs is clearly vital – but as we strive for that goal we must protect people’s right to health and keep them alive in all possible ways.

Three of the possible ways people living with HIV can be helped to survive the long wait for ARVs are:

Ensuring widespread access to comprehensive care and treatment approaches: to help people discover their HIV status, delay progression to AIDS and to prevent and treat HIV-associated conditions;

Improving health literacy among people living with HIV: particularly in relation to ‘early’ HIV-associated conditions, their prevention, management and drug treatment;

Identifying and minimising the factors that accelerate the development of AIDS-related conditions.

Employers, academic institutions, civil society groups, PWHA networks, health workers, media representatives, government bodies, advocacy groups, pharmaceutical companies and faith-based organisations should be giving more urgent attention to these relatively simple approaches to keeping people with HIV alive. Many of them are already readily available, affordable and effective.

They include:

Voluntary counselling and testing for HIV as the entry point for access to all health care services and self management

Prevention and treatment of tuberculosis (TB) in people living with HIV
Drugs to treat/prevent other opportunistic infections (e.g., cotrimoxazole, fluconazole etc)

Home- and community-based care approaches

Tackling HIV-related stigma, especially in health care settings, which often keeps people away from health services

Pharmacotherapy (e.g., methadone) for recovering injection drug users
Traditional healing and treatment approaches

Promoting food security and micronutrient provision.

Comprehensive care options such as these are vital elements to address the HIV/AIDS crisis that is engulfing the world’s poor and yet, as we enter 2005 they are not being given adequate attention.