Obama Still Squandering Global AIDS Funding on Morality

[Bluebear]

Serra Sippel is president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity in Washington, D.C.

...One year after the new PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) five-year strategy claimed to adopt a comprehensive, evidence-based prevention approach, AB-only (abstinence only) initiatives are still receiving significant amounts of funding. The PEPFAR 2010 operational plan, distributed Monday, indicates that close to 20 percent of prevention funding is still dedicated to AB-only programs. In Uganda, where unprotected sex is driving the epidemic, the U.S. is spending more money on AB-only programs than on all other programs to prevent sexual transmission.

Exhorting people to be faithful to their partners is not a public health intervention and the U.S. must stop squandering precious global AIDS resources on this moralistic intervention. The continued prioritization of the AB-only approach is diverting funding away from comprehensive prevention programming, despite research and policy pronouncements from Washington suggesting otherwise.

This World AIDS Day the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) is calling on the Office of Global AIDS Coordinator to:

• Follow through on its recent indication that the Bush-era Abstinence-Be faithful-Use Condoms (ABC) guidance is now defunct. It should make this clear in its new comprehensive prevention guidance and in all requests for applications and proposals for PEPFAR funding.

• Include recommendations of harm-reduction approaches to HIV prevention within the comprehensive prevention guidance, as proposed by the researchers of The Secret.

• Report on the impact of Congress' reporting requirement for prevention funding on the ability of partners and implementers to provide comprehensive prevention information and services.

• Report on funding that continues to support abstinence and fidelity only programs, providing an honest and thorough accounting of how much money is still spent on these interventions.

• Now that the Catholic Church at the highest level has indicated condom use can be justified in the fight against HIV/AIDS, ensure that Catholic Relief Services (which receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. government) and other recipients of PEPFAR affiliated with the Catholic Church are not excused from including male and female condom use in prevention programs based on religious grounds.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/serra-sippel/obama-still-squandering-g_b_790374.html

[Bluebear]

1. thank you

for the recs, brothers and sisters! :)