Traveling Exhibit on the AIDS Lazarus Effect

An exhibition launched by the Global Fund last week captures the transformative power of AIDS treatment through a collection of powerful photographs and video essays. To create “Access To Life”, photographers traveled to nine countries to document the experiences of thirty AIDS patients before and after they began antiretroviral treatment. The result is an intimate look at what is called “the Lazarus effect” in global health circles: after four months, patients once on their deathbeds look healthy and strong and have resumed their roles in their families and communities. Photos capture the physical changes (in Haiti, photographer Jonas Bendiksen used a Polaroid camera to document daily improvements) while interviews and film cover the emotional transformations. The videos especially are a testament to the wider impact wrought by AIDS - interviews with families and neighbors chronicle the heavy toll AIDS is taking on families, communities and businesses across the world.

These stories bring life to the statistics that we here at ONE know well: in poor and low and middle-income countries, nearly three million people are on life-saving antiretroviral treatment. This is no small feat, especially in Africa, where only a few years ago an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. Even once drug prices were brought down only 36 cents a day, critics still argued that expanding access to ARVs was impossible in Africa because the drugs were still too expensive, the infrastructure to deliver them was not there and the regimen was too complicated. Today, over 2 million Africans are on treatment, proving that in the poorest of settings, access to life will succeed. This exhibit puts some faces behind those numbers, reminding us why we need to keep fighting until access to these life-saving medications is universal.

Access To Life is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC from June 14 to July 20, 2008 The exhibition will then travel to Mexico City, Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome throughout 2008 and 2009.

-Nora Coghlan

Global Fund Considering Lending Cash

Sunday, Global Fund Director Michel Kazatchkine announced the Fund may begin to loan cash to developing countries that no longer qualify for their grants.

A quote the recent Reuters’ piece:

“By the end of next year 10 countries from the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region — including Turkey, Kazakhstan and Russia — will no longer qualify for Global Fund grants as they will be considered upper income countries.

But some of these countries have only just built up the mechanisms to battle AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria and Kazatchkine cited Kazakhstan as an example of a country which may benefit from a loan and extended help from The Global Fund.

Former Soviet Kazakhstan in Central Asia has grown richer over the last decade from high energy and commodity prices but faces an accelerating number of people with the HIV virus.”

-Virginia Simmons

I do some work for the Global Fund

I’m guessing a very large majority of the 1.4 million people getting AIDS treatment, the 3.3 million treated for TB, the 46 million people who have received mosquito nets paid for by the Global Fund, have no idea something called the Global Fund exists.

I’ve been visiting Tanzania this week, and the Global Fund wasn’t very visible, except when President Bush mentioned it. Does that matter?

After all, the Global Fund is just a way to collect the best proposals from countries, choose the best ones based on good science and medicine, and then monitor success. They have no offices in any of the 136 countries where they fund programs.

So if your relatives are getting mosquito nets, it probably doesn’t matter to you. Like most people, John Moses Nyahenge, a computer science student I spoke with in Dar es Salaam, said AIDS and malaria were two of the biggest challenges in Tanzania, that the U.S. is helping, and that he hadn’t heard of the Global Fund.

“They know it’s the US that saved their lives,” said Pam White, who runs the U.S. Agency for International Development in Tanzania, said about Zanzibar island. That’s true. In addition to the presidential initiatives on AIDS and malaria, the US is the largest contributor to the Global Fund (though France and Sweden and dozens of other countries, plus companies, foundations and (RED) buyers do too).

I do some work for the Global Fund, and I’ve met a lot of the staff. They’re fairly normal people, putting in long hours in an office across the highway from an airport. The good they help people do is pretty remarkable – more than 2 million people are alive today who wouldn’t be.

You can read more at strong>www.investinginourfuture.org.

-Seth Amgott

New Strides Against Malaria

The head of the Global Fund, Michel Kazatchkine, announced major progress in the fight against malaria today. While more than one million people still die from malaria every year, mortality rates for children under 5 have been cut in half in areas of Tanzania and Eritrea in the last five years and rates have also fallen significantly in South Africa, Mozambique and Burundi.

From today’s Reuters piece:

Insecticide-treated bed nets are one of the most cost-effective ways to prevent transmission of the disease, which is caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes.

The Geneva-based Fund announced on Tuesday it had delivered 46 million insecticide-treated bed nets to families at risk of contracting malaria this year, against 18 million last year.

It was working to ensure that all African families are protected with bednets and that countries attain “universal coverage” or at least a 60 percent coverage rate after which child mortality diminishes significantly, Kazatchkine said.

Read the full article here.

-Virginia Simmons