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News : Issues : 220 : Aids News
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Aids News
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|  |  | | by Editorial Staff, in Health & Body , posted 09 January 2010 |
Parliament ought to prevent the cuts on aids policies
The Ministry for Third World Aid is planning to cut aids budgets to accomplish half of their projected cuts. Dutch aids organizations think this is completely irresponsible and incomprehensible. Preceding the debate in parliament they’ve sent a public letter calling to halt this move. The cuts will mean over 100.000 people will not get the necessary medication in order to stay alive. Government is also not planning to invest in vaccine research.
Cuts
All international aid organizations together will have to cushion a cut of over 100 million euros. Almost half of which affect research for aids. The contribution to UNAIDS, the shared aids program of the United Nations will be cut with 25%, nine million euros. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is getting 31% less (28.1 million euro). The UNFPA (The United Nations program for sexual health) gets 11% less (6.6 million). The contribution to vaccine research and other new prevention techniques is cut completely.
Irresponsible choices
The decisions are incomprehensible. Very effective programs are now punished instead of being rewarded. The Global Fund - Holland is even board member - has proved to be a most effective financer in the battle against hiv and aids, tb and malaria.
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No other international institute, no bilateral donor has shown comparable results.
UNAIDS is hailed for its leading role within aids prevention.
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UNFPA is clearly improving women’s sexual health, which also shows in infection rates.
Concerning vaccines: after many years of investing there are finally a few hopeful developments, The Netherlands was one of the first countries to donate, it doesn’t make sense to cut that altogether now.
Aids treatment endangered
The worldwide economic crisis is hitting third world countries the hardest. They did not cause it but have to take the blow anyway. More and more countries state that they are not able to continue treatment programs on the same scale anymore. This means hundreds of thousands of men that will not be able to get the necessary medication to stay alive. And on top of that there are millions of people still waiting for medication.
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Effect of aids vaccine appears only marginal
Experts have discredited recent research in which scientists claimed to have discovered an aids vaccine after they’d been able to study the whole case and not just the results.
Scientists had tested the vaccine in Thailand on over 16.000 people. They claimed the risk on hiv, the virus causing aids, had dropped with 31 percent. Now it’s known that 51 people from the group that was vaccinated got infected anyway.
In the placebo group 74 people contracted the virus. The critics claim the difference is too small to be significant. The results show that the protection against the virus is marginal to begin with, and even further decreases over time. The final results were published in the scientific magazine New Journal of Medicine. |
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