Encouraging trends, grimmer reality

From left to right: Ms. Hendrietta Bogopane, Mr. Anders B. Johnsson, Ms. Kay Hull (moderator), and Mr. Jim McDermott. Efforts to rein in the global HIV/AIDS epidemic have not been in vain. More money is being allocated to fund the work. More people are coming to understand the basic facts about HIV. The annual rate of new HIV infections appears to be decreasing.

Behind these encouraging trends there lurks a grimmer reality. The people who are often relegated to the margins of society – the sex workers, the men who have sex with men, the injecting drug users – are still frighteningly vulnerable to the disease and continue to contract it at an alarming rate. Drug prices remain prohibitive for most carriers and only one third of the nine million people who need antiretrovirals actually get them. Children still account for one in six new infections, most of them dying before the age of two, and coverage for prevention of mother-to-child transmission is lamentably short of the target.

In June the United Nations General Assembly held its special session on HIV/AIDS. In an unprecedented move, the Assembly explicitly encouraged parliamentarians to join their national delegations to the high-level event. About 150 MPs responded to the call, and on the eve of the special session, the IPU held a briefing for them at the United Nations in New York.

Senior representatives of UNAIDS and UNDP gave informative presentations. The meeting then embarked on a discussion in which key statements were made by US Congressman Jim McDermott, who spoke critically of governments, including his own, that impose travel restrictions on HIV carriers; Belgian Senator Marleen Timmerman, who called for legislators to examine more closely the different drivers of the disease in their regions; and Hendrietta Bogopane MP, of South Africa, who said that parliaments and all their members had to acknowledge the impact of the virus on their actual institution and openly admit its existence.

The newly enlarged IPU Advisory Group on HIV/AIDS met in New York to distil the recommendations from the hearing and plan for future Group activities, which are intended to combine investigative field visits and regional training seminars. The IPU Handbook entitled Taking Action against HIV will be the basic textbook for the seminars. Plans are also being initiated for a second global parliamentary meeting on HIV/AIDS in 2009 building on the 2007 Manila event.

The events also included a lively working luncheon attended by parliamentarians, members of the diplomatic corps and leaders of multilateral organizations. The message emerging from that event was that informed, evidence-based legislation does make a difference and that as leaders in society more parliamentarians should stand up and be counted in the fight. The mothers and infants, the sex workers and drug users are going to need all the help they can get.