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Health
No other public health crisis has ever beenmore ill-informed or intricately interwoven
with religious andmoral judgments inmost cultures than theHIV&AIDS epidemic.
FireFlyz
shines the spotlight on the
MalaysianAIDS Foundation (MAF)
to understand
more on its year-longConnectingCommunities Programme
HIV & AIDS: Of Science, Stigma
& Shared Responsibilities
F
or
over 30 years since
the first outbreak, pub-
lic health experts and
medical practitioners have
been furiously working
to advance HIV (human
immunodeficiency virus)
science, with community activists world-
wide taking to the streets to protest
against HIV stigma and discrimination,
pleading to governments and authori-
ties for leadership on and commitment
to national AIDS (Acquired immune
deficiency syndrome) responses.
While extraordinary progress has been
made particularly in HIV treatment and
harm reduction for HIV prevention in
drug injecting populations, challenges
still remain with issues around treatment
access, stigma, policies and human rights
affecting people livingwith and vulnerable
to HIV.
Epidemic status
New HIV infections and AIDS related
deaths have decreased within the past
decade, largely due to the advance-
ment of antiretroviral medicines for
HIV treatment. As of now, we have
101,677 accumulated cases in Malaysia.
New cases peaked at 6,978 in 2002, but
went down to 3,393 new cases in 2013
after the introduction of harm reduction
programmes for drug users in 2006. The
trend scales globally.
That sounds like good news then!
Or is it?
Not quite. The numbers are still unac-
ceptably high, with roughly 35 million
people worldwide infected with HIV.
AIDS continues to be one of the leading
causes of death, claiming an estimated
1.5 million lives each year. While HIV
treatment has helped improve overall
quality of life and life expectancy, access
to treatment is, at best, limited.
In 2013, only 37%, or, 12.9 million
people living with HIV in the world had
access to antiretroviral therapy. The
scenario is similar in Malaysia – less than
45% of people eligible for treatment are
in fact already on treatment.
What seems to be the bottleneck
here?
One word – stigmatisation. Many victims
fear being shunned by their community
or disowned by their family. Furthermore,
the misconception of HIV being a death