Day: July 6, 2020

The United Nations says global HIV/AIDS targets for 2020 will not be met, and that some progress could be lost, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has seriously impacted the HIV/AIDS response.“Our report shows that COVID is threatening to throw us even more off course,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS said Monday at the report’s launch in Geneva. “COVID is a disease that is claiming resources — the labs, the scientists, the health workers — away from HIV work. We want governments to use creative ways to keep the fight going on both. One disease cannot be used to fight another.”COVID-19 is the disease caused by the new coronavirus.UNAIDS says despite expanding HIV treatment coverage — some 25 million of the 38 million people living with HIV now have access to antiretroviral therapy — progress is stalling. Over the last two years, new infections have plateaued at 1.7 million a year, and deaths have only dropped slightly — from 730,000 in 2018 to 690,000 last year. The U.N. attributes this to HIV prevention and testing services not reaching the most vulnerable groups, including sex workers, intravenous drug users, prisoners and gay men.COVID-19 poses an additional threat to the HIV/AIDS response because it can prevent people from accessing treatment. The U.N. estimates that if HIV patients are cut off from treatment for six months, it could lead to a half-million more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa over the next year, setting the region back to 2008 AIDS mortality levels. Even a 20% disruption could cause an additional 110,000 deaths.HIV/AIDS patients who contract COVID-19 are also at heightened risk of death, as the virus preys on weakened immune systems.The World Health Organization warned Monday that 73 countries are at risk of running out of antiretroviral (ARVs) drugs because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The WHO says 24 countries have reported having either a critically low stock of ARVs or disruptions in the supply chain.FILE – A doctor takes an AIDS/HIV blood test from an athlete during the 18th National Sports Festival in Lagos, Nigeria.Gains and lossesUNAIDS reports progress in eastern and southern Africa, where new HIV infections have dropped by 38% since 2010. But women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa continue to bear the brunt of the disease, accounting for nearly 60% of all new HIV infections in the region in 2019. Each week, some 4,500 teen girls and young women becoming infected. They are disproportionately affected, making up only 10% of the population, but nearly a quarter of new infections.Condom use has also dropped off in parts of central and western Africa, while it has risen in eastern and southern parts of the continent.Eastern Europe and Central Asia is one of only three regions where new infections are growing. Nearly half of all infections are among intravenous drug users. Only 63% of people who know their HIV status are on treatment. UNAIDS says there is an urgent need to scale up HIV prevention services, particularly in Russia.The Middle East and North Africa have also seen new infections rise by 22%, while they are up 21% in Latin America.“New infections are coming down in sub-Saharan Africa, but going up in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, going up in the Middle East and North Africa, and going up in Latin America. That’s disturbing,” Byanyima, the UNAIDS chief said.Progress is also impacted by draconian laws and social stigma. At least 82 countries criminalize some form of HIV transmission, exposure or nondisclosure.  Sex work is criminalized in at least 103 countries, and at least 108 countries criminalize the consumption or possession of drugs for personal use.One of UNAIDS’s main targets was to achieve “90-90-90” by this year. That means 90% of all people living with HIV would know their status; 90% of those diagnosed would be on antiretroviral treatment; and 90% of all people on treatment would have suppressed the virus in their system.Only 14 countries have reached the target, including Eswatini, which has one of the highest HIV rates in the world. The others are Australia, Botswana, Cambodia, Ireland, Namibia, the Netherlands, Rwanda, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.“It can be done,” Byanyima said. “We see rich and poor countries achieving the targets.”Globally, there have been gains in testing and treatment for HIV. By the end of 2019, more than 80% of people living with HIV worldwide knew their status, and more than two-thirds were receiving treatment. Therapies have also advanced, meaning nearly 60% of all people with HIV had suppressed viral loads in 2019.UNAIDS says that increased access to medications has prevented some 12.1 million AIDS-related deaths in the past decade.  While some 690,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses last year, that is a nearly 40% reduction since 2010.
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A Latino cook whose co-worker got COVID-19 waited in his truck for a free swab at a rare testing event in a low-income neighborhood in Phoenix. A Hispanic tile installer queued up after two weeks of self-isolation while his father battled the coronavirus in intensive care. He didn’t know his dad would die days later.
As the pandemic explodes in diverse states like Arizona and Florida, people in communities of color who have been exposed to the virus are struggling to get tested. While people nationwide complain about appointments being overbooked or waiting hours to be seen, getting a test can be even harder in America’s poorer, Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, far from middle-class areas where most chain pharmacies and urgent care clinics offering tests are found.  
“There really isn’t any testing around here,” said Juan Espinosa, who went with his brother Enrique to the recent drive-up testing event in Phoenix’s largely Latino Maryvale neighborhood after a fellow construction worker was suspected of having COVID-19. “We don’t know anywhere else to go.”
Hundreds of people lined up last week for another large-scale testing event in a different low-income area of Phoenix that’s heavily Hispanic and Black.
Arizona — the nation’s leader in new confirmed infections per capita over the past two weeks — and its minority neighborhoods are just starting to feel what New York and other East Coast and Midwestern communities experienced several months ago, said Mahasin Mujahid, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.  
“It’s the perfect storm as this hits unlevel playing fields all across the U.S.,” said Mujahid, a social epidemiologist who studies health in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Public health officials say widespread testing to rapidly identify and isolate infected people can help ensure residents of underserved neighborhoods get care while slowing the virus’s spread.
“Pandemics expose the inequalities in our health care system,” said Dr. Thomas Tsai, assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “What is needed is to make testing free and as available as possible.
“Outreach to the Hispanic population, the Black community, to immigrants, the most vulnerable, unprotected people is critical for public health,” with a national response being ideal, he said.  
But President Donald Trump’s administration has delegated responsibility for testing to states that have stitched together a patchwork of responses, forcing private foundations and nonprofit community health organizations to fill in the gaps and ensure people of color are reached.
“If you just set up the testing sites in wealthy communities, you cannot rein this in,” said Dr. Usama Bilal, assistant professor at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health in Philadelphia, where Black doctors recently won city funding  for testing in African American neighborhoods.
When Florida officials were slow to roll out testing in the migrant community of Immokalee, the nonprofit Coalition of Immokalee Workers called on the international aid group Doctors Without Borders for help.
The Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation in Chicago pushed hard before getting support from the city’s Racial Equity Rapid Response Team  to deliver free, widespread testing in that Black neighborhood.  
“It hit the African American communities very, very hard,” said the corporation’s executive director, Carlos Nelson. “We have since had great success in getting people tested and bringing numbers down. ”
In Arizona, the free drive-up testing June 27 drew nearly 1,000 people and was just the second big event of its kind in the heavily Latino neighborhood of Maryvale.
The first event, held June 20 by the privately funded Equality Health Foundation, drew criticism when much larger crowds than expected showed up, and some people waited for as long as 13 hours. Organizers had decided to take in those without appointments.
“It shows that there is an unavailability of testing if there is that kind of demand,” said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and former head of the state Department of Health Services.
Equality Health spokesman Tomás León acknowledged that “we were really overwhelmed” when so many showed up for the first round. The results from that event, while incomplete, showed about 24% of tests were positive, he said. Arizona’s positive rate statewide had risen to 25.9% as of Sunday for the past week, which is the highest in the nation, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The scene was more orderly a week later, after Equality Health doubled staff and nasal swabs and refused to accept people without appointments.  
Arizona officials have since committed to increasing testing sites, especially in Maryvale and other areas of west and south Phoenix that are more than 80% Latino. Testing sites also are scarce in a part of the city where some neighborhoods are more than 15% Black.  
“We need more tests, and we need more efficiency around tests,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in late June. “No one should have to wait hours and hours for tests to be conducted.”
But as of Sunday, Arizona was 38th among all states for the number of tests performed with results per 1,000 people, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.  
Like Black people, Latinos have high rates of health problems such as diabetes that make them more susceptible to the virus. And they often live in family groups that make the virus easier to spread.
Carmen Heredia, CEO of Valle del Sol Community Health, said an entire family of 20 recently took advantage of free testing in the small Latino and Indigenous town of Guadalupe, bordering Phoenix.
Carlos Sandoval, 45, said his whole family needed testing after exposure to his 65-year-old father, who got COVID-19 and was susceptible because of a kidney transplant six years ago. His mother tested positive but didn’t have symptoms.  
As Sandoval waited to be tested late last month, his father, was on oxygen at the hospital. His dad, also named Carlos, died June 30.
 
The family never imagined COVID-19 would touch them, he said.
 
“We, Hispanics, don’t believe the virus is very important until someone we know gets it,” Sandoval said.
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More than 600 companies say they won’t advertise on Facebook and its sister firm, Instagram, in July, as part of a campaign called Stop Hate for Profit. The goal? Force Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to address his firm’s negative effects on society, says Jim Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense Media, a children’s media education non-profit, and one of the boycott’s backers. “They are amplifying hate speech, racist messages, white supremacy messages, all sorts of misinformation and dishonest political advertising,” said Steyer. “So, we asked the major advertisers of America to pause their advertising on the platform for at least a month.”Just weeks ago, Steyer joined with organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and Color of Change to FILE – Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington.There’s no shortage of ideas of how to fix Facebook. Some call for regulations. Others say break up the company and make Zuckerberg, who has controlling shares in the firm, answerable to a board. Another idea: Hire ethicists to help with decision-making and give them power in the organization, says Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “I don’t think there’s any one core set of values,” he said. “I wish there was. And I wish it was some sense of trying to help the common good or trying to protect human rights or something that really helped them be a guiding principle for the company.” Facebook says it doesn’t tolerate hate speech and points to its automated system to remove inflammatory ads before users see them.Label content that breaks rulesRecently, the firm agreed to an external audit of how it is doing to make sure advertisers do not appear next to harmful messages, one of the boycott organizer’s demands. Facebook also said it would label content that breaks its rules, even those posted by an elected official. And it will remove posts that Facebook thinks may lead to violence or deprive people’s right to vote. These are important steps. But some critics argue it’s not enough.“Yes, they can change,” said Eisenstat. “It’s a question of whether they want to. Can they change as long as they continue to pursue being the biggest most dominant company in the world that absolutely has the monopoly over all conversations how we get our content, how we connect with people? Possibly not.”  The boycott organizers say their campaign is going global. But it will take time before they know if their efforts have a lasting effect.      
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Kevin Mayer, a former executive at Disney, recently started his new role as TikTok’s new CEO. He must prove to American lawmakers, regulators and consumers that they can trust the Chinese-owned app with their data, which analysts say won’t be easy. VOA’s Adrianna Zhang has more.
Camera: Yiyi Yang
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Tomas Kapler knew nothing about ventilators — he’s an online business consultant, not an engineer or a medical technician. But when he saw that shortages of the vital machines had imperiled critically ill COVID-19 patients in northern Italy, he was moved to action.”It was a disturbing feeling for me that because of a lack of equipment the doctors had to decide whether a person gets a chance to live,” Kapler said. “That seemed so horrific to me that it was an impulse to do something.”And so he did. “I just said to myself: ‘Can we simply make the ventilators?'” he said.  Working around the clock, he brought together a team of 30 Czechs to develop a fully functional ventilator — Corovent. And they did it in a matter of days.Kapler is a member of an informal group of volunteers formed by IT companies and experts who offered to help the state fight the pandemic. The virus struck here slightly later than in western Europe but the number of infected was rising and time was running out.”It seemed that on the turn of March and April, we might be in the same situation as Italy,” Kapler said.  Ventilators had become a precious commodity. Their price was skyrocketing and so was demand that the traditional makers were unable to immediately meet.”Corovent” lung ventilators, manufactured in Trebic, Czech Republic, are being tested, June 17, 2020.Components for the ventilators were also in critically short supply. So Kapler said he set out to “make a ventilator from the parts that are used in common machines.”  A crowd-funding campaign ensured the necessary finances in just hours.Kapler approached Karel Roubik, professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Czech Technical University for help. He, in turn, assembled colleagues through Skype, while his post-graduate student tested the new design in their lab in Kladno, west of Prague.They had a working prototype in five days, something that would normally take a year.Roubik said their simple design makes the machine reliable, inexpensive, and easy to operate and mass produce.  A group of volunteer pilots flew their planes to deliver anything needed. And then MICO, an energy and chemical company based in Trebic, 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Kladno, offered to do the manufacturing.Flights between the two places helped fine-tune the production line in a few weeks.  “I didn’t do anything more than those people who were making the face masks,” said MICO’s chief executive, Jiri Denner. “They did the maximum they could. And I did the maximum I could.”With the certification for emergency use in the European Union approved, the ventilator was ready in April — but it was not needed in the Czech Republic, which had managed to contain the outbreak.MICO has submitted a request for approval for emergency use in the United States, Brazil, Russia and other countries. Meanwhile, they’ve applied for EU certification for common hospital use.”Originally, we thought it would be just an emergency ventilator for the Czech Republic,” Kapler said. “But it later turned out that the ventilators will be needed in the entire world.”Kapler looks back at the effort with satisfaction.”I had to quit my job and I have been without pay for several months,” he said. “But otherwise, it was mostly positive for me. I’ve met many fantastic people who are willing to help.”Or to quote the slogan printed on the ventilator’s box: “Powered by Czech heart.”
 
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