A generation has passed since the world saw the peak in the deaths related to AIDS. Those deaths, agonizing, of diseases or infections, the body could fight differently, sent loved ones to the streets, pressing governments to act. The United States finally did, creating Pepfar, possibly the most successful foreign aid program in history. HIV, which causes AIDS, is now manageable, although there is still no cure.
Now the Trump administration has stopped foreign aid while alleging that it is a waste, causing chaos in the system that for more than 20 years has kept millions of people alive. Confusion about a temporary exemption to Pepfar, and the difficulty of restarting their work, with American workers, contractors and payments .
The global response led by the United States to HIV has been so effective that the neighborhoods of the people of the people who are destroyed are a vision of the past. Now health experts, patients and others fear that those days can return if the Trump administration will not reverse the course or other passage of global power in a vacuum and fast.
“In the next five years, we could have 6.3 million deaths related to AIDS,” said the UN AIDS agency to The Associated Press. That is a shock in a moment of growing complacency around HIV, the decrease in the use of condom between some young people and the emergence of a medication that some believe that it could end the aid forever.
The agency has begun to publicly track new HIV infections since the freezing of aid.
Here is a look at what happens to the body when HIV drugs stop:
A collapse of the immune system
HIV spreads through body fluids such as blood, breast milk or semen. Gradually weakens the immune system of the body and makes it vulnerable to the disease, including those that are rarely seen in healthy people. The surprising appearance of such cases in the 1980s is what inclined health experts to what was known as the AIDS epidemic.
Years of intense defense and shocking views of children, young adults and others who died of pneumonia and other infections led to the response that Pepfar created, the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief. Twenty million people around the world died before the program was founded. Now, millions of people take drugs known as antiretrovirals that prevent HIV from spreading in the body.
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Stop these drugs allows the virus to begin to multiply again in the body, and could be resistant to drugs. HIV can recover at detectable levels in people's blood in just a few weeks, putting sexual partners at risk. Babies born to HIV mothers can escape the infection only if the woman was properly treated during pregnancy or the baby is immediately treated after birth.
If drugs are not taken, a body is directed towards AIDS, the final stage of the infection.
The daily danger of germs
“Without HIV treatment, people with AIDS generally survive about three years,” says the centers for disease control and prevention.
For a long time, there may be not notable symptoms. But a person can easily spread HIV to others, and the immune system becomes vulnerable to what is called opportunistic diseases.
National Health Institutes say that opportunistic diseases include fungal infections, pneumonia, salmonella and tuberculosis. For a country like South Africa, with the largest number of HIV cases in the world and one of the largest numbers of TB cases, the toll could be immense.
Without control by HIV treatment, the damage continues. The immune system is increasingly unable to combat diseases. Each action, from eating to travel, must consider the potential exposure to germs.
For years, the importance of taking drugs every day, even at the same time of the day, people with HIV have emphasized. Now the ability to follow that essential rule has been shaken.
Hundreds or thousands of health members financed by the United States in countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia have already been fired, which caused generalized gaps in HIV tests, messages, care and support in the most aid continent by Pepfar. In some African clinics, people with HIV have been rejected.
Restoring the effects caused by the freezing of foreign aid of the Trump administration during a 90 -day review period, and understanding what is allowed under the exemption of Pepfar, will take time that health experts say that many people do not have .
Meanwhile, the head of the UN AIDS agency, Winnie Byanyima, told the AP that more resistant strains of the disease could arise.
And additional orphans of 3.4 million children could be made, another echo of the time when the world ran to face AIDS with few tools by hand.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press