The power to prevent HIV should be put in the hands of women, who depend on men to use a condom and can’t always choose to abstain, Bill Gates told thousands of delegates to the International Aids Conference in Toronto on Sunday.
”We need tools that will allow women to protect themselves. This is true whether the woman is a faithful married mother of small children, or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum,” said Gates. ”No matter where she lives, who she is, or what she does — a woman should never need her partner’s permission to save her own life.”
Addressing the opening ceremony of the conference, Gates and his wife, Melinda, called on world leaders to empower women through the acceleration of research for new HIV-prevention tools such as microbicides.
”We believe that microbicides and oral prevention drugs could be the next big breakthrough in the fight against Aids,” he said.
The ”abstain, be faithful and condomise” (ABC) approach to prevention has been successful, but cannot save the lives of those women who cannot always make such decisions. Male circumcision, which has recently been shown to reduce the spread of HIV significantly, is also a procedure that depends on a man, Gates said.
The Gates, along with United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) executive director Peter Piot, conference co-chairs Helene Gayle and Mark Wainberg and others addressed more than 24 000 delegates, scientists, researchers, activists and stakeholders from more than 170 countries attending the massive conference in Toronto, Canada.
Melinda noted that while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is making these discoveries an immediate priority, no discovery will save lives unless it can be distributed to everyone who needs it.
It has been 25 years since Aids was first discovered, and more than 40-million people worldwide are living with the disease. According to the most recent UNAids statistics, almost 11 000 people are infected daily, and 8 000 die every day from Aids.
”There are more people living with HIV/Aids than there are living in Canada,” Canadian Health Minister Tony Clement told a press conference ahead of the opening session. He welcomed delegates in the place of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who could not attend the conference.
About five million of these people live in South Africa, the highest number of people living with HIV/Aids in the world.
Gates said there is a ”new sense of optimism” in Africa, which arose from the world doing more than ever to fight Aids. ”The expansion of treatment is making a life-saving difference around the world,” he said. He said that the number of people in low- and middle-income countries receiving anti-retroviral drugs increased by an average of 450 000 a year between 2003 and 2005.
However, in the same period, 4,6-million people became infected with HIV each year. ”Even during our greatest advances we are falling behind,” Gates said, adding that with nearly 40-million people living with Aids, it would cost almost $13-billion a year, every year, to get treatment to everyone in the world.
Melinda told the audience that while finding a vaccine is an important focus, it is a long-term project and research has to be accelerated on other preventative tools that can be available sooner.
She added that proven approaches such as condoms, clean needles, education and testing are not reaching those who need them. She emphasised that stigma and discrimination are some of the reasons for this.
”The simple fact is that HIV is transmitted through activities that society finds difficult to discuss — activities that are infused with stigma — and that stigma has made Aids much harder to fight,” she said.
Frika Chia Iskander, a 24-year-old Indonesian woman living with HIV, spoke out against stigma and discrimination. She said she had once been refused treatment by a dentist because of her status, which showed that stigma was still rife. She stressed that people living with HIV/Aids and the youth should be included in the response to the epidemic.
”When I was diagnosed [with HIV] I was 18 years old. It’s people like me you want to reach,” she said. Iskander said the theme of the conference, Time to Deliver, means that the fight against the epidemic is ”beyond words, beyond commitment, beyond talk. We have to deliver, otherwise we will lose.”
UNAids’s Piot said it is important to put in place a long-term sustainable response that will anticipate the next 25 years of the growing epidemic. ”We will set ourselves up for demoralisation and indeed for failure of we base our strategies on wishful thinking that the end of Aids can be achieved any time soon.” — Sapa