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AHF Demands Audit, Casts Doubt on UNAIDS Claim of 21 Million on HIV/AIDS TreatmentAIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest nonprofit HIV organization that provides and supports HIV care to more than 833,000 patients in 39 countries globally, including Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America & the Caribbean and the United States, is again calling on UNAIDS to audit its numbers and estimations of people with HIV/AIDS receiving lifesaving antiretroviral treatment (ART). AHF's call came on the release earlier today by UNAIDS of a new report ahead of World AIDS Day (December 1st) showing that access to treatment has risen significantly in the past year: 21 million now on treatment, according to the "Right to Health" Report-nearly four million more than the 17 million UNAIDS claimed last year. In June 2016, just before the UN's High Level Meeting on AIDS in New York, UNAIDS made a similar optimistic announcement that two-million more individuals worldwide were on AIDS treatment now than in the prior year, bringing their estimate of those on treatment at that time to 17 million people worldwide. AHF challenged that number and called on UNAIDS to audit its numbers. "We are at the field level, not insid a glass office in Switzerland. We know firsthand what it takes in terms of difficulty to increase access to HIV testing, the time and effort needed in order to successfully link new HIV-positive individuals to treatment and to retain them in care," said Dr. Penninah Iutung, AHF's Bureau Chief for Africa based in Kampala, Uganda. "This new report, like prior UNAIDS reports, generates skepticism that the recent claims of global increase of patients under care and treatment keeps growing as if there were few difficulties at the field level, as if every one of the key stakeholders are doing their work without any resource constraints, as if the international resources targeting HIV were still increasing much like in the initial years after the creation of the Global Fund and PEPFAR." "We insist that UNAIDS and countries need to formally audit the number of people on treatment. The range of people claimed to be on treatment in the UNAIDS 'Right to Health' Report is based on estimations based on multiple assumptions done at the country, regional and global level combined with some data provided by governments, either to donors or, many times, through weak information systems; that's why the range of uncertainty goes from 18.4 million people on treatment up to three-million more people-21.9 million-assuming those assumptions are correct," said Michael Weinstein, President of AHF. "Highlighting overly optimistic, inflated, inaccurate numbers will lead the world not just to complacency, but to a false sense that we are approaching the end of AIDS and full control of HIV, when in fact, UNAIDS may be failing to highlight dangerous gaps. Treatment numbers must be verified or they are meaningless and actually detrimental to stopping AIDS." "The truth is that there are no mechanisms to audit these global numbers and many countries do not even dare to report their numbers to UNAIDS or WHO. A mechanism of auditing to the treatment site level is needed either by patient census or by representative samples in different countries, mainly in countries considered the most complicated ones like Nigeria, India and several others," added Dr. Jorge Saavedra, AHF's Global Public Health Ambassador and former Head of the National AIDS Program of Mexico. "Experience shows that there are some methods that tend to overestimate the number of people on ART, such as only counting the volumes of procurement without taking into account if they really reached the mouth of the patient. On the other hand, when big countries like Nigeria, India or Russia among others, do not release their full data, UNAIDS should embrace its leadership role and fully release all the assumptions used in order to estimate those numbers." AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 833,000 individuals in 39 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook (News - Alert): www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert): @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare.
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