HIV/AIDS Progress under siege

Double Blow of Reduced Funding and High Drug Prices Blocks Impact of Latest Science and Treatment Recommendations for People Living With HIV/AIDS

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been providing antiretroviral therapy (ART) to people living with HIV/AIDS for ten years, and today more than 160,000 people across the developing world receive ART through MSF. ART prolongs lives and dramatically improves people’s health, taking them from near-death back to health, family and employment. Across the developing world, more than five million people receive ART, which represents important progress. But a further nearly ten million people are in urgent need of treatment and will die without it within the next few years.

Encouraging recent data, including from MSF projects, shows that we can make progress against the epidemic – by decentralizing treatment; putting people on better treatment, earlier; and by shifting tasks from doctors to other healthcare workers. But just as these important gains are beginning to show their promise for patients, a stagnation in donor funding, coupled with trade policies that will create serious additional barriers to accessing affordable generic medicines, are dealing HIV/AIDS treatment a double blow. We know the tools we need to expand the initial progress on HIV/AIDS, but they are being taken away. To learn more, download MSF's briefing document below.