[:en]Remarks by Joanne Csete at launching of Asia Catalyst’s report I Will Fight to My Last Breath: Barriers to AIDS Treatment in China on April 28, 2009.

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 China.  I am also deeply honored to be in the presence of Mr Li Dan and Ms. Shen Tingting and to acknowledge their pioneering work on behalf of people living with HIV.

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?

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