World AIDS Day: Global solidarity and shared responsibility

The 2020 New Year's Eve found me as a visitor to a ginger farmer friend of mine John in a South Western district of Uganda whose sibling Jane was down with acute malaria. They wore a smile but the environment was clothed in silence and sadness. My presence in such a situation would have been utter absence if I didn't feel humanely sad, concerned and ‘silent'.

This is because as a human being whose life can be potentially threatened by malaria and would need the care from others felt the pain and sadness within John's home. I couldn't sustain the ‘kingship' of a visitor but spend the entire day distilling Aloe Vera juice for Jane. Remember I was a visitor in this home who didn't know that there was a malaria patient before I arrived but still I did something.

Global solidarity and shared responsibility is not hard to understand. We have the Johns, the Janes and the visitors who can also be Janes and Johns tomorrow.

This year, and I predict for the years to come, the fight against HIV/AIDS will need new weapons, new thoughts, stronger alliances and bigger intentions. Coronavirus has something to teach us on global solidarity and how this has been a sought for intervention in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Globally, coronavirus threatens to cause a 25 years (quarter a century) deceleration in the efforts made to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Coronavirus has posed a disruption to the health systems and interventions against the epidemic as approximately 37.9 million people globally live with HIV/AIDS and approximately 1.5 million people in Uganda. The sub-Saharan region continues to weigh down to the ‘imbalances' in the distribution of success made in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic as the entire Africa region accounts for 67% of people living with HIV/AIDS around the world.

Whereas the fight against the coronavirus has used and/or disrupted the HIV/AIDS health structures, it continues to lay lessons that we can borrow to the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic and leaves greater work for the fight against HIV/AIDS than there was to accomplish in November 2019.

The fundamental lesson that the coronavirus presents is that the World's health system solidarity is a strong weapon against disease and that understanding and care by each individual in their local communities is the Greatest Common Factor that can be leveraged on. The countries even with fewer cases and lesser prevalence in the HIV/AIDS should be equally concerned, just like they are in this coronavirus fight, about the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Never in modern history has a disease so clearly demonstrated that health is essential for individual, national, and global security. A disruption of health systems in the North has shown there can be an equal resultant disruption of health systems in the South and vice versa. It is sad that it took us long to realize or appreciate that. As COVID-19 sweeps across the world, it leaves devastation in its path at each of these levels but brings lessons to each individual whose efforts to fight against any pandemic with in their community can be of cross-border benefit.

Countries need to respect and work on the commitments made against HIV/AIDS, fund cross border interventions and care to take action on slapping down the sadder statistic in their neighboring countries. The global effort will help consume the cultural barriers that are responsible for stigma against people living with HIV/AIDS that is directly or indirectly responsible for over 50% of the 690,000 HIV/AIDS related cases globally in 2019 and the higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS in women that stands at 8.8% in Uganda compared to the 4.3 % prevalence amongst the men. The most affected are the Adolescent Girls and Young Women (which stands at 12.4% especially in the young women and adolescent girls aged 10-24 in fishing and related communities in Uganda) which is an evidence of cultural barriers, and political barriers that bleed structural inequalities and is reliably responsible for lack of access to medicines that people living with HIV/AIDS need. We can unite against stigma, structural inequalities and dissolve cultural and political barriers.

The good news is that not all options have been exhausted. The HIV/AIDS epidemic being a global problem, we are glad that we are not yet to live on different planets and therefore we still have the chance to work more collaboratively against the epidemic.

It is clear that there exists significant population ignorance about the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since we live in a world where information is a pill (toxic or healing), covering the schism caused by the information gap will help narrow the chances of new infections, get at least 90% of the population tested and practice prevention, at least 90% of those tested positive start on medication and at least 90% of those on medication suppress their viral loads. Through this the world will achieve the HIV care continuum of the UNAIDS 90-90-90 targets that currently stands at 81-67-59 worldwide in testing, treatment and suppression respectively. It is clear that success in the North to achieve the continuum and simultaneous failure in the South will not add up to the target and therefore calls for a global effort to actualize global success in the fight against the HIV/AIDS.

The digital world has many platforms that bring us together. The bad news is that we come to such platforms with weapons to fight each other and a life to exchange for death. The good news is that we have it or we can bring it to our lane of thought as Homo Sapiens to work together on such platforms to end the non-human threats against humanity before we threaten ourselves.

For a global solidarity and shared responsibility against HIV/AIDS.

The writer is a Global Health Corps Fellow