Cultural sensitivities dog AIDS meeting

UNITED NATIONS — No one at the high-level United Nations conference devoted to ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 denies serious scientific and financial challenges remain, but cultural sensitivities may prove the toughest stumbling block on the way to achieving that goal.

A number of gay and transgender groups were excluded from attending the three-day-long conference that began Wednesday by countries who objected to their presence and nations squabbled over references in a final statement to topics involving gay sex and intravenous drug use.

General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft conceded that cultural sensitivities complicated negotiations, but hailed the final result, which calls for countries to reduce the number of new HIV infections to below 500,000 a year by 2020, down from 2.1 million in 2015 and bringing the number of annual AIDS-related deaths to under half a million in 2020 from 1.1 million last year.

“It’s obvious that cultural sensitivities have played a very big role in all the difficulties we have met during this process and of course many of us hope that at the end, the evidence we have of what works, the evidence we have on the necessity to integrate all key populations in the efforts against this epidemic will prevail, but there are different opinions, there are limitations for how long we can come with a consensus in the whole U.N. family,” Lykketoft said.

Matthew Kavanagh, senior policy analyst for the anti-AIDS group HealthGap, said he applauded the so-called 90-90-90 treatment target for 2020 whereby 90 percent of people infected with the disease know their HIV status, 90 percent of those who know they are infected are accessing treatment and 90 percent of those receiving treatment have suppressed viral loads.

But Kavanagh said he was disheartened over efforts by countries like Russia, Iran, Poland and several Gulf states, who managed to strip language from an earlier draft of the conference’s declaration that would have called for the decriminalization of homosexuality and drug use and urging they be treated instead as human rights issues.

“So there’s one reality that bold targets have been set,” Kavanagh said. “Then there’s this other reality that we will never reach those targets so long as critical populations, like men who have sex with men, are criminalized and stigmatized, because when they are they can’t and won’t access treatment.”

Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, recognized the complexity of the issue but added that he felt the declaration was something to be proud of.

“I think anything linked to sexuality is very complex. … It’s not easy to deal with a political declaration when you’re talking about HIV/AIDS. You’re confronting different societies, different opinions,” Sidibe said.