nunesgh

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34148326

Gates said Musk had canceled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women transmitting HIV to their babies, in the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” he said.

[...] The disruptions have caused new HIV infections to surge in recent months and threaten to derail plans to eradicate the virus as a public health threat by 2030.

In one stark case, the cuts have cast uncertainty over the rollout of a newly developed injectable that scientists have hailed as “the closest thing to a vaccine that we have ever had in HIV response”.

As a result, many prevention programs involving pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs, or Prep, ground to a halt without US funding. Even services that were allowed, such as testing and treatment, also stopped due to the disruption and confusion caused by Doge’s shutdown of USAID, according to the United Nations. People who showed up to receive testing or medicine often found that no one was there to give it to them, according to a UN health official.

[...] In Botswana, the number of people receiving Prep has decreased by half since last year. The 30,000 people in Mozambique who were receiving Prep at the end of last year recently went down to 19,000, according to a UN tally. In Zimbabwe, the number of people receiving Prep declined from 4,000 to 1,800 in the same time frame. In Nigeria, 850,000 condoms distributed in December went down to 300,000 by February.

[...] US partners working on prevention services have had their agreements terminated, while UNAIDS projects that if Pepfar’s treatment and prevention services are stopped entirely, it would result in an additional 6.6m HIV infections by 2029.