(Vatican Radio) How successful has the Catholic Church been in responding to the AIDS
crisis? What do faith groups offer people living with HIV that may not be available
from secular sources? And how can the Church maintain its AIDS ministry effectively
in the face of funding cutbacks and shortages? All these questions will be on
the table at a Catholic AIDS conference being held in Washington DC this weekend,
ahead of the UN International AIDS Conference due to open in the US capital on Sunday.
The UN meeting, which concludes on Friday 27th has taken as its theme
‘Turning the Tide Together’. A staggering 30.000 scientists, activists, researchers,
health care professionals, celebrities, philanthropists and experts of all kinds will
be reviewing progress over the past two years and discussing new ways of winning the
battle against the global HIV pandemic. Among the participants at both events
is Msg Robert Vitillo, special advisor on HIV-AIDS to the worldwide Caritas confederation.
He spoke with Vatican Radio’s Philippa Hitchen about his hopes for the UN meeting
and the focus of the Catholic conference which opens this Friday…..
Listen:
“We certainly
have had very good results with the people who’re getting access to ARV treatments
- right now about half of the people who need the treatment are getting access, which
is much better than it was when we started 10 years ago to bring ARV to the developing
countries… At the same time I think this theme is a sign of people realising we
can no longer see it simply as a medical problem….
The conference organisers
have set a number of goals … to make the prevention revolution real, expanding testing
and treatment, ensuring appropriate funding for key vulnerable populations, turning
the tide on TB and AIDS and then a cure for HIV…..
Finally it seems that some
of the HIV specialists realise that the previous approaches taken in the northern
countries, focusing on the distribution of condoms, I think some of the specialists
at least realise we need a much more integrated approach to the social, economic and
spiritual issues…
For many years now we’ve convened a Catholic pre-conference
as we think it’s very important for those working in Catholic programmes to be able
to come together and reflect on the Church’s teaching at the root of why we do this
work in HIV and AIDS…
(Prevention of mother to child transmission) has been
quite successful in encouraging pregnant women to be tested early and access treatment…..
I think a realistic goal of eliminating new infections in children by 2015, but the
key is keeping the mothers alive and well…
Another interesting finding from
the study (by Catholic HIV AIDS Network) was that the Catholic programmes take a family
approach to treatment and prevention… encouraging couples to be tested together and
to see this as a family problem…
(Funding cutbacks) are a very serious concern
– last year we did a study on the impact of cutbacks that were already being seen
– whole families being told to select one family member to go on treatment….
The
fact that the conference has returned to the US is significant ……at the same time
there are many models been developed by churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America and
we must be more open to learning from them…”