Wed 8 Mar 2017 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
The equivalent of three full-time jobs have disappeared at the NZ AIDS Foundation as it restructures itself to operate within what is effectively a shrinking level of government-provided public health funding. NZAF Executive Director Jason Myers The NZAF is the country's primary HIV epidemic prevention organisation and is facing the highest level of newly-diagnosed HIV infections amongst gay and bisexual men in thirty years, generated by an increasing number of men already having the virus and changing sexual activity patterns facilitated by the digital revolution. Treating people with HIV with medications and associated therapies costs the government $32 million, and rapidly rising, per year. The NZAF receives $4.5 million per year from the government to try to knock back the HIV epidemic. That prevention funding, from the Ministry of Health, has barely changed since 2009, which the NZAF's executive director, Jason Myers, says equates to "a 7% funding cut over eight years at conservative estimates" when effects such as inflation are taken in to account. For three years the organisation has dipped into reserves and even mortgaged its Auckland office building to the tune of $500,000 in an effort to retain staff expertise and service levels. It is currently in negotiation with the Ministry over funding for the next three years beginning July 1st but will not be drawn on whether the just-announced cuts relate to the way those negotiations are progressing. The staff cuts have been "organisation wide and impacted all teams," Myers says. "In the context of increasingly limited resources, the goal was to arrive at a structure that will deliver the new strategic plan and be financially sustainable into the future." That strategic plan includes the bold objective of ending all person to person transmission of HIV by 2025. In 2015, the latest year for which annual figures are available, 224 people - the highest number ever - were diagnosed with HIV, although some of those infections were contracted overseas. Within that figure a minimum of 153 gay and bisexual men were found to be infected. Most of those infections were contracted in New Zealand and the figure is likely to be higher as the sexuality and method of transmission for some men is not known. Epidemiological experts have stated that the increased figures are less likely to be generated by increased numbers of people testing for HIV more often and more likely to relate to actual new infections. Alluding to the NZAF's struggles to get full Ministry and Pharmac funding support for recently-available HIV prevention methods such as PrEP, early treatment and increased HIV testing, the NZAF's Myers says “at a time where we now have the tools to seriously tackle new HIV infections in New Zealand, it is deeply disappointing that the country’s leading HIV organisation has been forced to make cut backs.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 8th March 2017 - 9:29am