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.