Uganda AIDS Programs at Risk from Proposed US Budget Cuts

March 28, 2011

Uganda was one of the first sub-Saharan African countries to address the HIV/AIDS crisis early on. Over the years, it’s come to rely heavily on U.S. support for its prevention and treatment programs. But Congress is considering cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Dr. Edward Bitarakwate says Uganda has come a long way in its effort to stem the epidemic.

“The situation now,” he says, “is much better than it was 20 years ago, where at one point we had a peak in prevalence of up to 18 percent in certain sections of the population. So the prevalence has really come down now to about 6 and a half percent in the adult population. So we’ve had very successful prevention programs that have enabled the prevalence rates to stabilize around there.”

Bitarakwate is the Uganda country director for the U.S.-based Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

“We’ve also had a very successful treatment program and we have over 250,000 patients receiving lifesaving antiretroviral therapy – the treatment for HIV. That’s a number that’s been progressively increasing over the years. We still have a long way to go. We still need to put an extra 100,000 patients on treatment if we are to meet our treatment target. And so a lot of the program is trying to address that gap,” he says.