15 October 2009

Former High Court judge and social justice advocate the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG has called for better strategies to curb the spread of AIDS and HIV in the Asia Pacific.

During his presentation at the 2009 Menzies School of Health Research Oration in Darwin, Kirby said that AIDS was far from over and that the pandemic was entering its ‘third phase’.

“After identification and alert to the disease in the early 1980’s  and then bold moves to provide anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) worldwide, the global strategy in AIDS now has to change.”

“On latest figures, 2.7 million people become infected with HIV each year, many in the Asia-Pacific region, and in times of global financial crisis such as now, it is unlikely that the world will continue to fund expensive ARVs for an ever-growing population of infected people.” 

“Without a cure or an effective vaccine, HIV is a hugely expensive pandemic to deal with, yet the only strategies of prevention that have been known to succeed involve radical efforts to change behaviour.

Kirby went on to say that these changes in behaviour include reaching out to the gay community, sex workers, drug users and other vulnerable groups such as Indigenous people, dependent women, refugees and prisoners and that to alter behaviour patterns in this way will require reform of the law. 

“Developing countries at the forefront of the epidemic resist such reforms for religious or cultural reasons so you are back to square one,” Kirby said.

“The pandemic has reached a critical moment and the question now is will humanity have the wisdom to grasp the essential lessons of HIV/AIDS transmission?”
 
In his remarks, Michael Kirby paid tribute to the cutting edge research of the Menzies School of Health Research into sexually transmitted infections and emphasised the importance of research for the global, regional and national policy to respond to HIV/AIDS. 

“AIDS is far from over” Kirby concluded. “This clash between what is needed and what is likely to be adopted is the essential dilemma that we now face.”

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For more information contact Julie Carmichael - 0429916758