Posted on December 16, 2013
Source: BBC
By Chris Beyrer & Michel Kazatchkine
Nobody Left Behind campaign
December 1 is, as it has been every year since 1988, World Aids Day.
Much progress has been made, but in this week's Scrubbing Up, Chris Beyrer, president-elect of the International Aids Society and Michel Kazatchkine, the UN Secretary General´s Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Eastern Europe and Central Asia warn that we are at a turning point in the fight against the disease.
They are co-chairs of the 'Nobody left Behind campaign', an International Aids Society initiative.
Living in Paris in 1986, Andrée was a drug user with no hope of access to an effective treatment for HIV (since there was none), and no access to harm reduction (since it did not exist).
She had lost her friends and family, she was stigmatised - and she ultimately died a lonely death after a few months in a hospice.
Larissa, from Kaliningrad in Russia started antiretroviral treatment late in her HIV disease, and only because of her privileged contacts, but had no hope of treatment for her hepatitis C.
She had been rejected by friends, neighbours and family. She too was stigmatised - and she had been repeatedly arrested and incarcerated.
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Today, cost is not the primary obstacle”
But Larissa's story is from 2013, not 1986. While 25 years has passed in the circumstances of these two women, their predicament was depressingly, tragically, the same.
How this can possibly be so, in a period when so much progress has been made?
