Publications

Over the last 20 years, violence against women (VAW) has been increasingly recognized as major health, human rights and development issues. The Secretary General’s In-depth Study on all forms of violence against women recommends intensified action to eliminate violence against women at all levels. The General Assembly's resolution urges United Nations (UN) entities to enhance coordination and intensify their efforts to eliminate violence against women in a more systematic, comprehensive and sustained way. It further calls upon UN entities to extend coordinated efforts to assist States in their efforts to eliminate violence against women.

The Annual Sentinel Surveillance for HIV was started in the country in 1998 using standardized methodology. It is conducted by the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) and the States AIDS Control Societies (SACS). National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW) has been associated with it for data collection, monitoring, analysis and preparing the country report since 1998. The Annual Sentinel Surveillance 2007 round was carried from 1st October 2007 to 15th January 2008 in all the states in India.

Public Health Watch, a project of the Public Health Program of the Open Society Institute, aims to strengthen meaningful and sustained engagement by infected and affected communities in the development, implementation, and monitoring of TB and HIV policies, programs, and practices. Public Health Watch supports advocates to identify, document, and articulate priority human rights issues, and to press for accountability at the national, regional, and global levels. Public Health Watch believes engaged, well-informed individuals and community groups are needed to ensure that government policies really live up to the commitments made at the international level; to scrutinize whether and how policies and guidance are implemented; and to point out where the numbers may not reflect the full reality on the ground.

In 2003 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began its large HIV prevention program, the India AIDS Initiative, later called Avahan, to curtail the spread of HIV in India. At the time, there was an understandable sense of urgency about the rising prevalence of HIV in the world's second most populous country. Avahan has successfully built a large-scale HIV intervention program in its first five years. It operates in six states in India, which have a combined population of 300 million people. Within these states, it provides prevention services to nearly 200,000 female sex workers, 60,000 high-risk men who have sex with men, and 20,000 injecting drug users, together with 5 million men at risk.

This book aims to inform networks of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and concerned civil society organisations about how patents can make their medicines more expensive and what they can do about it. It provides a step-by-step basic guide to enable these stakeholders to minimise the number of medicines that are patented in their country, and still ensure that medicines are affordable even if they are patented. The book also explains how some free trade agreements and other treaties can make medicines even more expensive. This book gives concrete examples of how PLHIV networks in partnership with key partners have reduced the impact of patents on medicines, including for medicines for the wider population in Thailand and India. It provides a clear illustration of how small local and national actions led by PLHIV can generate tremendous global impacts in today's borderless and inter-connected world.

Factors such as stigma and discrimination, poverty, criminalization of drug use, sex work and homosexuality, limited antiretroviral therapy (ART) service facilities and lack of trained healthcare professionals on HIV treatment have all been cited as barriers to HIV treatment access for people living with HIV (PLHIV). Although studies have also provided the frameworks for understanding and addressing how gender and sexuality, employment and drug use-based social status have impeded our goal of delivering treatment, care and support to marginalized communities; progress in achieving equitable access on essential HIV healthcare services remains disappointingly slow. In 2008, the Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (APN+) conducted a network-based research project aiming to explore the experience of women, men who have sex with men/transgender people (MSM/TG) and injecting drug users (IDUs) living with HIV in accessing ART and other HIV-related healthcare services.

A key challenge faced by women infected and affected by HIV in the Asia Pacific region is the denial of their right to inheritance and properties. Reports from networks of women living with HIV, as well as academic research in the region, show that it is a crucial factor in reducing women's vulnerability to violence and HIV, as well as empowering women to cope with the social and economic impact of the epidemic at the household level. This booklet and the film enclosed comprise the highlights of the Court and reflections by people concerned with the issues. While the film takes one directly to the Court proceedings, the intention of the booklet is to help set the context and serve as a companion.

The Commission on AIAIDS in Asia publicly released its report Redefining AIDS in Asia: Crafting an Effective Response, in March 2008, by handing it over to the UN Secretary General Mr Ban Ki-moon in New York. Since its publication, the report has attracted the attention of both policy makers and academics working in the field of HIV. Many have requested access to the background papers that formed the basis of the Commission’s report. This Technical Annex is an attempt to put the evidence collected by the Commission in the course of its work into the public domain. The studies included in this Annex, as one can see, cover a wide range of themes like epidemiology, unit costing, assessing the total resource need, cost-effectiveness and socio-economic impact in general and in particular on women, children and young people. Research material bearing on legislation, impact mitigation and effectiveness of HIV programmes has also been presented. Many areas addressed in this Technical Annex are either new or not previously discussed adequately. Some of these include providing a clear quantitative basis for prioritization of most-at-risk populations; estimating the unit cost of interventions; measuring the impact in financial terms at the household level; and quantifying addition to poverty due to HIV.

As yet, little is known about the HIV epidemic status and potential in Afghanistan. The country seems to be at an early epidemic phase with low HIV prevalence, but there are a number of underlying vulnerability factors that could lead to the conditions for epidemic expansion, including drug trafficking, the post-conflict situation with displacement of populations, a fledgling health care system, and a low level of knowledge and awareness about HIV/AIDS. As in other parts of central and south Asia, the most important proximate determinants of the scale and distribution of an HIV epidemic in Afghanistan will be the size and characteristics of high risk networks involving injecting drug users (IDUs), female sex workers (FSWs) and men who have sex with men (MSM) who are at high risk (i.e., have high numbers of sexual partners). Assessments from elsewhere in central Asia indicate an explosive growth in injecting drug use and commercial sex work throughout the region, concurrent epidemics of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and economic and political migration. As yet, little information is known about the size, distribution, and characteristics of IDU and sex worker sub-populations in Afghanistan. Therefore, the World Bank (WB) agreed with the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) to contract with the University of Manitoba (UM) to conduct an assessment of these three key, high risk populations in three cities of Afghanistan: Mazār-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kabul.

A few years after the first reported case of AIDS in the USA, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) had also established itself in Asia. It spread quickly and by the early 1990s, HIV infections were being reported in every country of Asia. In some, notably Thailand, major epidemics were underway. A little more than two decades later, an estimated 9 million people in Asia have been infected with HIV, and millions of them have died of AIDS-related illnesses. The Commission on AIDS in Asia was set up in June 2006 and assigned an 18-month mandate to study and assess the impact of AIDS in Asia, and to recommend strategies for a stronger response to HIV and AIDS. The Commission's terms of reference and its composition are provided in the annexes to this Report.