Wed 8 Mar 2017 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
A leading expert with three decades of experience in analysing New Zealand's HIV epidemic is bewildered by the timing of cutbacks at the primary HIV prevention organisation forced by what is effectively a minimum 8% funding cut in recent years. Professor Nigel Dickson The NZ AIDS Foundation has just announced staff cut-backs as it struggles with the effects of a the eight-year funding freeze forced on it by the Ministry of Health which hasn't allowed for the erosion of capacity by inflation. The Government and its agencies have also been reluctant to fund PrEP therapy, early treatment on diagnosis and up to date research at levels which experts, including those at the World Health Organisation, say is necessary to control or even stop the epidemic. This comes at a time when more gay and bisexual men than at any time in the thirty-year long HIV epidemic are being diagnosed with HIV and the government's bill for HIV medication is $32 million per year and rising fast. Professor Nigel Dickson, who recently retired as the director of the AIDS Epidemiology Group at Otago Medical School, and who has closely analysed HIV infection and diagnosis rates for almost thirty years, is bewildered by the funding freeze the NZAF is struggling with. "To me it doesn't seem to be the right time to be relaxing on anti-HIV efforts in New Zealand," he says. As early as 2013 Dickson was urging those responsible for funding and delivering HIV and sexual health services to increase their focus on gay and bisexual men. As an example, he noted even then that between 80% and 90% of all syphilis cases in New Zealand were being transmitted between men who have sex with men, with one in five of those men diagnosed with syphilis also have HIV. Dickson has not been alone in his calls for heightened attention to the HIV and sexual health issues faced by men who have sex with men. Internationally-respected health researcher Dr Peter Saxton of Auckland University has also repeatedly called for more resources to be channeled into this area. He has said that gay men's health issues are not being given equal attention compared with heterosexual people's issues and stated that "there is nothing inevitable about HIV infection. It is entirely within our ability to control these epidemics if we’re collectively willing to take effective action." And the immediate past-Executive Director of the NZAF, Shaun Robinson, is on record as expressing frustration with the funding-based issues the NZAF and those treating people with HIV are facing. On the matter of Pharmac's refusal to fund virus-lowering medications to HIV-positive people immediately on diagnosis, thereby massively reducing their likelihood of passing on the virus, Robinson said in the middle of last year that if Pharmac hadn't made the medications available from the time of diagnosis within three months the glbti communities should be getting "very angry." So far Pharmac has not changed its stance.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 8th March 2017 - 10:23am