Haiti Receives Assistance to Fight AIDS Epidemic

The Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria agreed last week to give $24.7 million to combat AIDS in Haiti, which has the worst AIDS epidemic in the Americas. The fund may disburse as much as $70 million there over the next six years.

"It's going to make a dramatic impact," said Anil Soni, an advisor to the Global Fund, a group founded last year at the urging of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Last year, 30,000 Haitians died of AIDS, twice the number of those who perished in the United States. Some 250,000 of Haiti's 8 million citizens carry the virus. The nation has been hit so hard that the average life span, 46 years, has fallen five years since the epidemic erupted in the early 1980s.

The grant will provide antiretroviral therapy for 1,300 people a year; offer HIV testing to about 40,000 people; distribute 15 million condoms; and offer community education programs.

By the end of the first year, the program hopes to provide antiretroviral drugs to hundreds of HIV-positive women in an effort to reduce mother-to-child transmission. Community-based efforts will include foster care for orphans of parents who die of AIDS, micro-credits to foster parents, distribution of food and hygiene packets and home visits to families living with HIV, Soni said.

A political stalemate over disputed parliamentary elections two years ago has left Haiti deprived of hundreds of millions in foreign aid. "We are not giving a single cent to the government," Soni said. "Haiti came to us and said, 'Give us money but don't give it to the government.'" Instead, the government agreed that the fund's grant should go to international agencies, like CARE and the Red Cross, and to local community-based organizations including Partners in Health, Soni said.

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