Cash-strapped TAC on verge of closing AFTER almost two decades spent fighting for HIV treatment and access to medicines, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) may close its doors due to a severe funding shortage. The TAC has just one-third of its budget for next year, according to Mark Heywood, head of public interest law organisation Section27. Donor-funding cuts have forced the Aids advocacy organisation to retrench staff and cut programming at least twice in recent years. Heywood said the organization - once dubbed the worlds beacon of HIV activism by former UN Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa, Steven Lewis - cannot survive another downscaling. Heywood, speaking on the final day of the biannual Southern African HIV Clinicians Society Conference, said scaling back causes rupture, demoralisation and programmes to be interfered with at a critical time and it usually takes several years to recover from. At the meeting, HIV physicians noted a renewed need for the TACs brand of patient-treatment education with the January introduction of earlier HIV treatment and the need for antiretroviral (ARV) patients to begin annual viral load tests from doctors. As more donors pull out of South Africa, Heywood said sustaining the HIV response - and the work of HIV advocacy organisations like the TAC - would be up to South Africans. He said civil society brought the notion for the first time that people with diseases, people living with HIV should be consulted and should be part of planning and be part of response. Increasingly, he said, this is being overlooked and civil society is being marginalised from debates and policy-making. Heywood said civil society brought to the AIDS epidemic everything that now defines the response to the epidemic in South Africa. Laura Lopez Gonzalez: Health-e News Service
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 06:30:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015