World AIDS Day

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/12/01/aids-funding.html?ref=rss

Tories confirm new AIDS funding of $250M

The federal government chose World AIDS Day to announce its long-awaited HIV-AIDS initiative package, pledging to spend an extra $250 million this year and next.

International Co-operation Minister Josée Verner made the announcement at a news conference in Montreal on Friday.

"We subscribe to this year's theme, which is to put a stop to AIDS," she said in French. "The new Canadian government is determined to play a very important role in combatting AIDS."

AIDS activists had expected the funding to materialize during the World AIDS conference in Toronto in mid-August.

However, the Conservative government cancelled a planned announcement at that time, saying the AIDS gathering had become too politicized and was not the right place to announce the package.

The $250 million will go to the World AIDS Fund, which is administered by the World Health Organization. Of that money, $120 million is new this year.

Canadian dollars will go toward research, prevention programs and care for people around the world.

More than 25 million people worldwide have died from AIDS since the disease first emerged 25 years ago. Another 40 million have been infected.

"Canada does recognize we have to do even more," Verner said. "We have pledged to take a long-term approach to combatting AIDS."

Much of the Canadian money will support projects in Haiti and Mozambique.

Here's where some of the Canadian money is going:

* $10 million to the government of Mozambique to support its national AIDS council.
* $50 million to help provide proper treatment in Sub-Sahara Africa, where 60 per cent of those with the disease are women and girls.
* $2.5 million for a McGill University project in Montreal aimed at preventing parent-child transmission of HIV-AIDS in Zimbabwe.
* $20 million over two years to support collaborative Canadian and African research projects.

At the press conference, reporters asked Verner why the new funds will support international initiatives, as opposed to projects in Canada.

Verner didn't not answer the question directly, but hinted that other projects may be funded down the road, including some in Canada.

"This is the first in a series of announcements that are coming," she said.

She said the projects chosen so far are ones that are working well in specific countries.

"We intend to focus on them, to reach some concrete results," she said.
Activists call for funding in Canada

Canadian HIV-AIDS activists have recently urged Ottawa to increase funding for research, prevention and treatment in Canada.

Although overall Canadian infection rates have stabilized in recent years, thousands of people still contract the virus, Ken Monteith, director of AIDS Community Care in Montreal, said Thursday.

"The estimates are really that a new person in Quebec becomes infected with HIV every six hours."

In Quebec, the rate of infection is increasing fastest among heterosexual women, who represent about 25 per cent of new diagnoses in the province, Monteith said.

"Fifty per cent of the women and children living with HIV or AIDS in Canada live in Quebec," he told CBC News.

There's a strong need for research funding and education, especially among younger people, Monteith added.

Teenagers often hold the false belief that AIDS is a curable disease, or is a virus plaguing Africa alone. "Someone has to wake up and do better sex education in our schools, because young people are losing touch with this, and they don't realize it could happen to them," he said.

The federal funding announcement is the first since 2004, when Ottawa pledged to double HIV-AIDS research to $84 million by 2008.

If the increasingly fundamentalist U.S. (and other areas of the world) didn't put a "morality clause" in their willingness to fight AIDS, Africa wouldn't be so deep into its HIV crisis today.

The current American administration will allow funding to Third World AIDS workers, but only if they teach abstinence before marriage don't distribute or educate people about birth control. Religious groups are of the "if you don't have sex/do drugs, you won't get it" mindset.

The United States should be leading the world in solving Africa's HIV epidemic and it's done disgustingly little for two decades. These überpowerful religious groups and superchurches aren't doing a goddamn thing to mobilize their congregations to help. Instead, we get this bullshit and people continue to die.

I fully blame conditional morality clauses from the Western world for the degree of the AIDS crisis in Africa.