The Global AIDS Crisis - Four Steps for Canada

"Nothing in my adult life prepared me for the carnage of HIV/AIDS."
Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS

Over 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, half of them are women. Nearly all live in poor countries and are unable to get the treatment and care they need. Since 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS - 3 million last year alone. Over 13,000 people are infected daily with young people especially at risk. Half of all new infections occur among 15 to 24 year olds with young women being 2 to 6 times as likely to be infected as young men.

In recognition of Toronto hosting the 16th International AIDS Conference, August 13-18, Oxfam has joined with a broad coalition of social justice groups, the Global Treatment Access Group (GTAG), to develop a common "civil society platform for action" that highlights four areas in which Canada should take action to help address the global AIDS crisis:

• Pay our fair share of prevention and treatment in developing countries.
• Invest in the public health care systems of developing countries.
• Cancel the debts of developing countries to free up resources to fight AIDS and poverty.
• Follow through on commitments to make medicines affordable to developing countries

To pay its fair share to cover the cost of HIV prevention, care, treatment and support programs Canada should increase its contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria to 5% of total need. This would require an additional CDN$140 million for 2006-07. As Stephen Lewis has stated, "there is no other international financial vehicle dealing with AIDS that reaches so many people in so many diverse countries."

An essential prerequisite for improving health and fighting disease is a functioning public, not-for-profit, health care system. Crumbling infrastructure, chronic under-financing, workforce attrition, and migration of health care workers have eroded health systems in many developing countries, even as the burden of disease has increased. Canada must invest its aid dollars in rebuilding the public health systems of poor countries.

On average, African governments spend on debt service three times per capita what they spend on health care. Of the ten countries with the highest levels of HIV infection, only two - Zambia and Mozambique - will benefit initially from the debt relief plan promised by the G8 in 2005. By mid-2006, the plan will remove only 13% of the debts of the 62 countries most burdened by AIDS, debt and poverty. Canada should broaden debt relief to all countries that need it.

The cost of medicines is a major obstacle to achieving universal treatment. In 2004, Parliament unanimously passed an act to help developing countries obtain more affordable generic medicines from Canadian manufacturers. Since the law came into effect in May 2005, not a single generic drug has left Canada as a result. Next year's Parliamentary review must reform the law to make it work.