United States (US) funding cuts to South Africa (SA) \u200chave dismantled Human immunodeficiency (HIV) prevention programmes just as they are needed to support the roll-out of the new prevention drug lenacapavir, a report said this Tuesday.<\/p>\n
SA has the world’s largest population of HIV-infected \u200bpeople, with about eight million, one in five adults, living with the virus. \u200bThe US funded about 17% of the country’s HIV budget until US President \u2060Donald Trump slashed aid last year as part of his “America First” foreign policy.<\/p>\n
The report by \u200bPhysicians for Human Rights, a US-based Non-Governmental Organisation , said that Washington effectively wasted billions of dollars \u200bof investment by abandoning research infrastructure and health delivery platforms which it had spent years building in SA.<\/p>\n
In the near term, that will hinder the rollout of lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable HIV prevention \u200bdrug which arrived in SA this month, the report said.<\/p>\n
“We have a product that’s \u200breally powerful, but we don’t have a programme to fit it into anymore,” said Emily Bass, a \u200cco-author \u2060of the report.<\/p>\n
The US\u00a0had funded community-based outreach and peer education programmes about different HIV prevention options, for example, without which they may not know lenacapavir exists, she said.
\nSA’s health department and the US State Department did not immediately respond to requests for \u200bcomment.<\/p>\n
The impact of the \u200bfunding cuts is difficult \u2060to measure because funding for data collection was also cut, said the report. However, it documented widespread disruption to HIV programmes in \u200bboth clinics and communities, based on interviews with dozens of people \u200binvolved in \u2060SA’s HIV response.<\/p>\n
“We know that there are many Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex\u00a0communities, many sex workers, many, many young people who are not accessing services because of this,” said Yvette Raphael, Executive Director \u2060of \u200bAdvocates for the Prevention of HIV in SA.<\/p>\n
Last \u200bweek, US government figures suggested HIV aid globally had been maintained despite the cuts; but the data showed declines in \u200btesting and diagnoses.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15535,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-32636","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"SA has the world's largest population of HIV-infected \u200bpeople, with about eight million.","published_date":"","news_description":"SA has the world's largest population of HIV-infected \u200bpeople, with about eight million.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/32636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/32636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32653,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/32636\/revisions\/32653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=32636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}