Write Us In – a campaign to ensure equitable access to healthcare for LGBTI people

Every year millions of marginalised people around the world are denied access to life-saving healthcare.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance launched the campaign – Write Us In – in May which ran over IDAHOT. The campaign drew attention to the need to include LGBTI people and other marginalised groups in new post-2015 health goal. For IDHAOT, the campaign highlighted the specific health needs of young LGBTI people. As part of the campaign, the Alliance organised a high-level meeting on the fringes of the World Health Assembly in collaboration with Ministries of Health of Luxembourg and Ecuador and UNAIDS. The Alliance invited Brant Luswata, a young gay man and LGBTI health advocate from Icebreakers in Uganda as the guest panel member. Brant gave compelling testimony to the 100 + delegates of the barriers in accessing HIV services and healthcare for young LGBTI people in Uganda highlighting need to ensure that young LGBTI people are not left behind in new health goal.

Announcement of the campaign:

We have a window of opportunity to ensure that every one of us receives the healthcare we need, wherever we are, whoever we are. 

Right now, governments are agreeing the next set of global development goals which will determine the agendas and policies of countries for the next fifteen years.

Decades of hard-won progress in the fight against AIDS could unravel unless governments commit to including lesbian, gay, bisexual and intersex (LGBTI) people in the health goal under the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

If we don’t act now, the health goal to ensure that everyone can have access to affordable and high quality health services through Universal Health Coverage (UHC) will not address the specific healthcare needs of LGBTI people and other marginalised groups. This provides a licence for discrimination and persecution rather than treatment and protection.

Take action and sign a letter to the two people responsible for drafting the UHC text – Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Health Organization and Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank. Ask them to make sure the new health goal is fully inclusive and protects everyone.

#WriteUsIn

The day has been observed annually, on December 1, since 1988. This year’s World AIDS Day is focused, once again, on the campaign ‘Getting to Zero’; a 5 year campaign (2011 – 2015) backed by UNAIDS and the World AIDS Campaign.

This December 1, an estimated 35.3 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS. Less than one third of the global total – 9.7 million people – have access to life saving antiretroviral therapy.

HIV continues to be perhaps the major global public health issue of our times, having claimed more than 36 million lives so far.

Today, there are thousands of events taking place around the world – from formal declarations from heads of states, to community events run by grass roots activists, to huge visibility projects such as this campaign in Melbourne, Australia, and this in Brighton, United Kingdom. Various online awareness raising campaigns will also be active today, such as Lambda Legal’s 15 Ways HIV Criminalization Laws Harm Us All and the UNAIDS campaign #ZeroDiscrimination.

Whilst many will be marking the day by focusing on nationwide and local issues and campaigns, various organisations will also be underscoring – as highlighted by the World Health Organization today – that HIV/AIDS is a global epidemic, with uneven impact and responses internationally. At least 25 million of those living with HIV/AIDS worldwide today, for example, are living in Sub-Saharan Africa; 1 in 20 of the region’s adult population.

Moreover, in most cases, efforts to combat the epidemic are heavily dependent on healthcare quality and access to life-saving medicines; often mediated by international trade relations and, in many cases, property rights frameworks which limit people’s access to life-saving drugs.

Supporters of the South African organisation, Treatment Action Campaign, for example, are marching silently through the town streets of Piet Retief today, in an effort to highlight shortage of medicines.

“We feel attention must be drawn to the serious problems in the health system in the area. It will not help people to know their status if they cannot get access to ARV treatment, counselling or quality healthcare… We cannot celebrate while clinics do not have stock of essential HIV and TB medicines, while hospitals run out of food and important equipment,” the organisation said in a statement.

A recent report by the group Stop Stock Outs Project – backed by Section27, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Treatment Action Campaign – also highlighted that at least one in every five public health facilities in South Africa have run out of HIV or TB medication. The drug shortages, they say, have become a “national crisis”.

IDAHO Committee Executive Director, Joel Bedos, also took the opportunity today, to highlight the impact of stigma – often related to sexual orientation and gender identity – in driving the epidemic, and hindering effective responses.

“In low-income countries, Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) have an estimated eight-fold higher HIV prevalence rate compared with the general population, and MSM in high-income nations have 23 times the prevalence rate of the general population,” he said.

“Vulnerability of sexual and gender minorities to HIV is proven to be driven by discriminatory regulations and practices, which restrict the capacity of individuals to access prevention programs and treatment, either because they are forcefully excluded from the health care facilities, or because they don’t go there in the first place, for fear of abuse, discrimination or even violence. In addition, self stigma will stop many people from caring about themselves enough to have protected sex, get tested, or seek treatment once they are infected.”

“Discrimination lies at the foundations of social stigma against sexual and gender minorities, and no discriminatory context can be changed if social stigma is not profoundly addressed. In other words, homophobia and transphobia are today the major drivers of HIV among MSM, even if biomedical factors such as virus transmission patterns also play a role.”

“Decision makers and donors need to be aware of the essential necessity of factoring in meaningful strategies to combat stigma within any action plan addressing the vulnerability of sexual and gender minorities.”

Today, there are lots of different ways to get informed, and to help get the word out. Here are just some of the online tools and resources you will find.

Fact up, get the word out:

• Like millions around the world today, change your social media profile to the red ribbon or get a red ribbon ‘twibbon’ added to it here.
• Details of events around the world from UNAIDS.
• World Health Organization HIV/AIDS factsheet.
• The globally recognised World AIDS Day proclamation (pdf).
• The Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic – A Timeline of Key Milestones.
• Take the quiz ‘How HIV Aware Are You?’
• World Health Organization Press Release for December 1.
• Information and campaign resources (from United States government).
• Join key campaigns such as Greater Than AIDS on facebook and (RED) on twitter.
• Follow events throughout the day on twitter via the hashtags #WorldAIDSDay and #WAD2013