Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

HIV and AIDS stake­hold­ers say the re­cent de­ci­sion by the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca to freeze its for­eign aid for 90 days shows just how vul­ner­a­ble civ­il so­ci­ety groups are in the hands of ex­ter­nal part­ners.

On Jan­u­ary 20, the ad­min­is­tra­tion of US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump de­cid­ed to freeze all for­eign as­sis­tance, in­clud­ing for the Pres­i­dent’s Emer­gency Plan for AIDS Re­lief (PEP­FAR), which sup­ports the achieve­ment of epi­dem­ic con­trol and sus­tain­able re­sponse in T&T and four oth­er Caribbean coun­tries—Ja­maica, Guyana, Suri­name, and Bar­ba­dos.

Yes­ter­day, dur­ing the ninth meet­ing of Na­tion­al AIDS Pro­gramme man­agers and key part­ners at the Hy­att Re­gency, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Vul­ner­a­ble Com­mu­ni­ties Coali­tion Ivan Cruick­shank told his coun­ter­parts that they could not con­tin­ue to pre­tend that ex­ter­nal part­ners would al­ways be there to save and pro­tect civ­il so­ci­ety, which he said had a cru­cial role in end­ing AIDS as a pub­lic health threat.

With the Unit­ed Na­tions tar­gets to en­sure that by 2030, 95 per cent of peo­ple liv­ing with HIV know their sta­tus, are re­ceiv­ing treat­ment and have a sup­pressed vi­ral load, Cruick­shank called on the man­agers of the Na­tion­al Aids Pro­gramme as well as their de­vel­op­ment and gov­ern­ment part­ners to agree on what ac­tion would be tak­en in the next five years and civ­il so­ci­ety’s role dur­ing that time.

“Where the rub­ber hits the road, when things are hap­pen­ing at coun­try lev­el, when civ­il so­ci­ety is in need, of­ten­times gov­ern­ment is not nec­es­sar­i­ly avail­able,” he said.

He called on the man­agers to push to­wards “re­al coun­try own­er­ship and full do­mes­tic fi­nanc­ing” of HIV and AIDS pro­grammes by find­ing ways to fund civ­il so­ci­ety.

“We can’t con­tin­ue to pre­tend that ex­ter­nal part­ners are al­ways go­ing to be there to save civ­il so­ci­ety and to pro­tect what they are able to con­tribute to our na­tion­al re­spons­es; we can’t con­tin­ue to do that,” he stat­ed.

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said T&T had made sig­nif­i­cant progress in its HIV re­sponse and had re­duced the di­ag­no­sis of new cas­es by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent. In 2010, there were 821 new cas­es, and in 2024, 424 new cas­es were record­ed.

“In 2017, our fig­ures stood at 79-78-87 (79 per cent of peo­ple liv­ing with HIV di­ag­nosed, 78 per cent of di­ag­nosed in­di­vid­u­als on treat­ment, and 87 per cent- achiev­ing vi­ral sup­pres­sion). Da­ta for the year 2024 shows that we have im­proved to 83-79-93,” he stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to Deyals­ingh, key in­ter­ven­tions were dri­ving his min­istry’s progress, such as ex­pand­ing HIV test­ing ser­vices, in­tro­duc­ing self-test­ing, im­ple­ment­ing the ‘treat all’ pol­i­cy, en­sur­ing ac­ces­si­ble treat­ment across all re­gions, and adopt­ing the U=U mes­sag­ing, which means Un­de­tectable = Un­trans­mit­table.

He said this meant that in­di­vid­u­als who achieve and main­tain an un­de­tectable vi­ral load can­not sex­u­al­ly trans­mit the virus. He said this was a crit­i­cal mes­sage for re­duc­ing stig­ma and en­cour­ag­ing treat­ment ad­her­ence.