By Josh Greenstein
Asia
Catalyst's recent
report vividly depicted the barriers Chinese kids face to getting AIDS
treatment that they need to survive. One key problem is that powerful
U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies have made some AIDS drugs extraordinarily
expensive - including both second-line drugs that are essential for those who
have built up resistance to the first line of AIDS medication, and pediatric
medicines. The
On April 28, Asia Catalyst hosted a panel at NYU School of Law on pediatric AIDS in China featuring Meg Davis, Lauren Burke, Joanne Csete and Ken Legins, and moderated by Jerome A. Cohen. The panel also announced the launching of our report I Will Fight to My Last Breath: Barriers to AIDS Treatment for Children in China.
I would like to offer these remarks in honor of our
colleague Mr Hu Jia who is currently in a Chinese prison partly because he
exercised his freedom of speech in the form of bold advocacy on behalf of
people living with HIV in
I congratulate Asia Catalyst on the hard work that went into the production of this very useful report and especially for reminding us that addressing HIV in any population means addressing a wide range of human rights and human rights abuses.
We are in a moment in the global health world when there are many powerful interests making the case that the world has focused too much on HIV, that HIV has been treated as too "special" and has received too much money and attention, and that we need to make our response to HIV more like the response to other health problems. My reaction when I hear this is that this line of argument opens the door for those who would push us back to the time when all global health problems were horribly underfunded and neglected. Why are we not all pushing for every health problem and for health systems challenges to attract the kind of funding that HIV/AIDS has attracted, rather than for HIV to be pushed back into the "normalcy" of other problems?
