The shock of the Trump presidency: AIDS treatment programmes in South Africa and a US-funded facility for malaria prevention, Malaria screening, and vaccines
And the impact in Uganda hasn’t been limited to HIV. According to Brian, health centers have stopped doing cancer screenings on mothers and no more patients will be seen until further notice.
Billions of dollars in annual funding to battle HIV, Malaria, and other health problems will be affected by US actions such as the foreign aid freeze and pull-out from the World Health Organization. That will cost lives and threaten global security, say researchers. Peter Horby, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Oxford, says that this will make the world a less safe place.
The team would have been in Northern Nigeria right now on a field study aimed at improving HIV treatment across the country if the events in Washington, DC had not been so dramatic.
Stopping treatment causes the HIV virus to rebound, making it possible for a person to transmit HIV, and also facilitating the evolution of drug resistance. The director of AIDS treatment programmes is hoping that someone will take notice of the ending of the treatment programmes.
“People haven’t had a chance to get alternative funding because of the abrupt nature of this,” says Salim Abdool Karim, director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, in Durban. The centre was due this week to enrol the first patient in a USAID-funded trial of HIV vaccines, which is now on hold. It’s using reserve funds to continue the trial testing on whether vaginal inserts can help prevent HIV transmission.
The shock of the Trump administration’s policy changes is more pronounced in the field of global health. Scientists, medics and health officials say the large influence of the US on fighting disease globally will be difficult to replace.
“We patients who are HIV positive, we are really panicked,” says Wanyama, whose two children do not carry the virus. He’s lost his job mentoring other HIV-positive people at a US-funded facility and is worried about continued access to medication. “The way things are going, I feel like I have worked so much for nothing.”
When Donald Trump announced a freeze on foreign aid, the world was thrown into turmoil. Millions of people around the world who are positive for HIV are helped by the US foreign aid programme.