"AIDS battle burnishes Bush's legacy in Africa" -- Associated Press

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.

Like countless Africans, Mzolisa looks forward to Barack Obama becoming America's first black president Jan 20. But — like countless Africans — Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped to treat more than 2 million Africans, support 10 million more, and revitalize the global fight against the disease.

"It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent," says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. "It has changed so many people's lives, saved so many people's lives."

Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women's support group to "share the pain." In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group's vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools and taxi ranks.

Hundreds of projects get funding

Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.

Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world's estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 — a goal it says was reached in 2007.

Congress last year passed legislation more than tripling the budget to $48 billion over the next five years, with Republicans and Democrats alike hailing the program as a remarkable success.

But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is under 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.

In most African countries, life expectancy has dropped dramatically, and only a few, like Botswana, have started to turn the corner again.

And with no end in sight to the global financial crisis, there are fears about whether all the funding approved by Congress will be delivered.

Read the entire story here.

"A Killer and a Cure" -- by Dr. Josh Ruxin

This December 1st marked the 20th commemoration of World AIDS Day. The international commemoration has perennially been accompanied by new, bleak reports, and bureaucratic hand-wringing over the invariable failure of supply – in the form of drugs, management and financing – to keep up with the needs of the desperately ill around the world. However, this year, there’s actually some rather interesting news.

A new study just released by Harvard shows that President Mbeki has now topped the charts as one of the world’s top killers of all time. His outrageous ignorance and deadly policies resulted in excess deaths of at least 350,000 South Africans. The study does not include the lives lost in other countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where South Africa’s perspectives are deeply influential. Quantifying the toll of Mbeki’s malfeasance is an important step toward rectifying the challenges in Africa: leadership in the fight against AIDS does make a difference and those who choose not to lead must be identified as collaborators in the killing.

Meanwhile, for the first time since the advent of anti-retroviral therapy and vaccine trials, hope for a cure has emerged. Through a bone marrow transplant, a German scientist has perhaps cleared the first AIDS patient of the virus – quite possibly the first time in human history that a person with AIDS has been effectively freed of the virus. There is nothing easily replicable about this case, but this breakthrough offers a glimmer of hope for what is essential to bring the pandemic to a halt: a cure. Despite nearly a quarter of a century of treatment and research, over 30 million people are currently afflicted with HIV and close to 2 million die from AIDS each year. Most worrisome is the momentum of the pandemic itself: 2008 registered nearly 3 million new cases of the disease, and only a small proportion of them are likely to receive treatment before perishing.

Treatment is an area of notable success in spite of its failure to reach a high proportion of those in need. In 2002, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was born and the dream of billions for fighting the pandemic became a reality. In 2003, President Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to combat global HIV/AIDS – the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history. In 2003, approximately 50,000 people in all of Sub-Saharan Africa were receiving anti-retroviral treatment. Today, the Global Fund and PEPFAR support anti-retroviral treatment for nearly 1.7 million people in the region – and tens of thousands more around the world, from Asia to Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, that is still not enough. In June of this past year, a joint WHO/UN Aids report showed that nearly three million people are now receiving anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, but this is less than a third of the estimated 9.7 million people who need them today (what isn’t stated is those 2/3rds in need will likely die in the next 24 months). We must reach more people and we must do it quickly.

As we see a world-wide recession take root, we have to redouble efforts to raise money for treatment and research. Global surges in poverty are a recipe for increases in diseases like AIDS. Short-term budgetary cuts can have massive and multiplied effect in the public health world: now is the time to increase, not decrease expenditures. For example, we have made remarkable advances in the fight against malaria over the past few years, so much so, that deaths can potentially be eliminated over the next few years with the proper infrastructure and funding. The same could be true for AIDS with the right approach and commitment.

The key to fighting AIDS includes a multi-pronged approach for now.

Private donors and for profit organizations should join in the effort as well. Organizations like MAC AIDS Fund and the Gates Foundation have helped the cause dramatically. There are key roles for players of all sizes. Here are some top recommendations taken from the report of the Global HIV Prevention Working Group:

• National political and public health leaders should develop and implement AIDS strategies and operational plans tailored to the particular dynamics of national epidemics; integrate prevention and treatment services; and increase prevention interventions sufficiently to have measurable impact. Countries scaling-up adult male circumcision – and any other biomedical strategy that proves effective – should combine these efforts with complementary behavior modification campaigns to decrease the risk behavior that can occur when new strategies or tools are introduced.

• International donors should commit to rapidly funding these tailored national HIV prevention programs. Additionally they should make available by 2010 at least $11.9 billion U.S. annually to support scale-up of evidence-based HIV prevention programs as part of a comprehensive response to HIV. Donors should ensure robust financing for community-driven responses that build local civil society capacity and leadership.

• Multilateral and other technical agencies should develop mechanisms to assess the soundness of national HIV prevention strategies, identifying instances where national plans conflict with available evidence about the dynamics of HIV incidence, or where selected prevention strategies are not based on evidence of what is effective with particular populations.

• AIDS activists and other civil society groups should strongly advocate for the simultaneous scaling up of HIV prevention and treatment.

President Bush has committed significant U.S. funds to combat AIDS, and over the next four years, President-elect Obama should dedicate as much, if not more, of the country’s resources to this fight. He should also give due consideration to what worked well in the Bush Administration’s approach and what could have been done more effectively with the same resources. If we’re found simply debating whether we have the means to win the battle, we will find that we have already lost it.

Dr. Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda, where he administers the Millennium Villages Project in Mayange. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker. His regular posts can be found on the blogroll of Nick Kristof of the New York Times, and he has given his permission to be cross-posted here. Josh and EGR executive director Mike Kinman team-teach a global poverty module for Trinity, Wall Street's Clergy Leadership Project.

Rowan Williams' World AIDS Day Video

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams has recorded a video message to mark the 20th annual World AIDS Day today.



The video sees the Archbishop talk about the Church's worldwide involvement in care and education surrounding HIV and AIDS, and calls for faith leaders to 'encourage and support' what is being done by listening to those who work on the front lines.

There are currently 30 million people worldwide living with HIV.

He says "Our hope and our prayer today is that the excellent work that's done, not just in developing countries but here at home too by the Churches will continue and deepen and be strengthened by our prayer and our commitment."

"Recognising that people living with HIV is us not them, whether it's leaders and congregations, congregations and 'outsiders' - it's us. It's all of our business...Church leaders and Church congregations taking responsibility for educating the wider public."

In the video Dr Williams speaks with representatives from Tearfund, Christian Aid, NAHIP and African HIV Policy Network, Zimbabwe Womens Network UK and Rise Community Action.

This video, along with all other Lambeth Palace videos, can be viewed at the Lambeth Palace YouTube channel - http://youtube.com/lambethpress

If you would like to find out about some of the ways Anglican organisations are seeking to combat HIV and support and empower those living with HIV, please see the links below:

Australian Board of Mission - Fighting For Life: STOPAIDS and the Anglican Church in PNG

CHAA - The Christian HIV/AIDS Alliance - CHAA has initiated a Creed for the AIDS pandemic suitable to be read in church services for World AIDS day or any other occasion when the pandemic is remembered.

USPG - Projects: Action on HIV

See also - AngliCORD, Episcopal Relief and Development, The Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, Christian Aid, CMS Britain, CMS Ireland

"Hannah Ministry -- Bringing hope to child-led families in Rwanda" -- by Josephine Mujawiyera

The densely populated area of Northern Rwanda around the provincial centre, Byumba, has a high concentration of orphaned children. The Byumba area suffered four years of war leading up to and including the 1994 genocide. During this period, many widows were raped, a high proportion died after contracting HIV/AIDS, leaving orphaned children, many of whom themselves infected with HIV/AIDS. Since the genocide, many parents have died from HIV/AIDS or other causes, creating many more orphans.

In the past, help came traditionally from the extended family, but following the displacement of whole communities, the dislocation of families and the extreme poverty which followed the genocide and its aftermath, extended families have generally been unwilling to take on the additional burden of accepting orphaned children under their own roofs, limiting their involvement to supervision, hoping that others (often international aid agencies) would take responsibility for them.

The Anglican diocese of Byumba has had a particular ministry for widows and orphans since the genocide. From the beginning, their emphasis has been on providing psychological and practical support to widows and orphaned children within their own home environment. This approach is now being widely supported by the aid agencies, NGOs and the Rwandan government, who all recognise the advantages of enabling children to become self-supporting in the environment they know.

Nevertheless, until recently, few coordinated programmes have been established to adopt such an approach in a holistic manner.

Hannah Ministry, an autonomous organisation under the umbrella of the diocese of Byumba, has put in place structures and practical support (largely drawing upon the volunteers within the distributed parishes across the area) aimed at fully equipping orphaned children for an independent future within a family unit made up of their own siblings.

The child-headed family support programme takes its inspiration from the Kinyarwanda word, 'tumurere' embedded in Rwanda culture -'let us combine our efforts to care and bring up children'.

Among the many things Hannah Ministry provides is a sponsorship programme to support child-led households. With a gift of just $20, a month a child will get education, food, shelter, manpower on a child field, health care counseling and close follow up on his state.

For more detailed information about the many programmes of Hannah Ministry and information about sponsorship, download the Hannah Ministry Report from the EGR website or on the Friends of Byumba website (www.friendsofbyumbaorg).

Who are these child-led households. Here are but two of many examples.

This is a typical housing for a child who did not get any sponsorship and subsequently can't repair the house by himself. These two children live in a house left by their parents when they died.

Here is a picture Seraphine with her siblings taken at their home. There is need for proper sharing for a child-led household to get support. How many times do they go to bed without supper?

Sponsors are encouraged to pray for the families and for the Hannah Ministry and its important work, and to encourage friends and other family members to become sponsors. All details can be found on the website or obtained from me by email at jomuja@yahoo.fr.

(Editor's note -- I have been to Byumba and seen firsthand the work Josephine and many others are doing with Hannah Ministry. It is an excellent example of the Church living out Christ's call to seek and serve him in the most vulnerable of the world ... everything that EGR is about. Josephine's tireless, passionate and creative work with Hannah Ministry is why I asked her to blog for EGR. For a further testimonial about Hannah Ministry, contact the Rev. Amy Real Coultas, Episcopal campus minister at the University of Lousiville, who has been working closely with Josephine in supporting this ministry. Find out more -- and how to donate through Amy's church at -- www.helpinghannah.blogspot.com)

Josephine Mujawiyera runs "Hannah Ministries," a Christian organization in Byumba, Rwanda working with at-risk children (orphans, children infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, children living in a child led household, and street children). It is a local initiave born to respond to the needs of children living in child-led households.works with people living with HIV/AIDS. Jospehine also does general post-genocide reconciliation work (among MANY other things) in Byumba, where she lives with her husband, who is bishop of that diocese.