Testing an AIDS theory on a country with the world’s highest HIV rate

published on December 1, 2011 in The Globe and Mail

In the country with the world’s highest HIV rate, clinics have been running out of medicine. They break open the bottles of pills, divide them in half, and dole them out in small plastic bags to patients who worry that their lifeline is eroding.

“They say they don’t know how they’ll survive,” says a young woman named Goodness, an advocate for HIV-positive people, who won’t give her full name for fear of punishment by Swaziland’s authoritarian government.

Dependent on AIDS medicine herself, she surveyed clinics and found patients quitting their treatment because of the shrinking supply of drugs. “Their hope is lost, and that’s why they decide to default,” she says. “It hurts. We don’t know what to do.”

On the ground in Swaziland, where today, on World Aids Day, 26 per cent of adults have the AIDS virus, the fight for antiretroviral medicine is a battle for survival. A financial crisis here has disrupted the supply of medicine, forcing a U.S. agency to step in with emergency stocks. Globally, the situation is slipping into the same crisis, with looming cuts to the biggest global AIDS fund.

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© Copyright BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS
St. Paul's Hospital 608–1081 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 1Y6
Tel: 604-806-8477 | Fax: 604-806-9044
General inquiries: info@bccfe.ca
Media inquiries: communications@bccfe.ca
(Please do not use any of these email addresses to send personal information or book an appointment. To book appointments or contact the H2H clinic, please call 604-416-1517 or fax: 604-564-4893. Do not send your or your client's personal information via email.)

Our work serves clients and communities across British Columbia on lands and waters cared for and nurtured by the many distinct First Nations across the province. The BC-CfE humbly and gratefully acknowledge the stewards of these lands, particularly the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) on whose unceded, traditional and ancestral territories our offices are located.