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According to the political programs, the HIV epidemic would be “defeated”… The AIDES Association wishes to put this subject back at the heart of the debates and the imminent presidential election. As Camille Spires, the President of AIDES, declared, “We ask for the listening and the support of the public authorities, they have the responsibility to carry out health policies commensurate with the challenges of the fight.”
“Faced with AIDS, no candidate”
The presidential election is approaching and AIDES, the first association for the fight against AIDS and hepatitis, created in 1984, deplores the fact that “no candidate” did address the HIV epidemic. However, the virus continues to circulate, infect patients and cause deaths. AIDS is not a fight to be left behind.
The numbers are indeed telling. Globally, around 37 million people are living with HIV and 10 million of them do not have access to life-saving treatment, 47% of them children aged 0-14 years. In 2020, more than 680,000 people died of AIDS. Nationally, nearly 200,000 French people live with the HIV virus. Also, 30% of HIV infections were discovered at an advanced stage.
AIDES regrets, however, that “these themes, as crucial as they are, are absent from the current electoral debates and are not the subject of any concrete commitment on the part of the candidates.”. The finding is, according to the Association, alarming, because “Today, to face AIDS, there is no candidate”.
To denounce this silence, AIDES is carrying out its own campaign
Since March 14, the Association, recognized as being of public utility, has placed distorted visuals displaying five candidates for the presidential election in the public space. They are Yannick Jadot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Emmanuel Macron, Valérie Pécresse and Anne Hidalgo. The latter are visible from behind in order to demonstrate their lack of interest in the face of HIV and AIDS.
Their demands center on three essential points. First, AIDES denounces the failure of a policy of “all repressive“, which penalizes drug users too heavily. The Association calls, on the contrary, for better supervision of the use of psychoactive substances through the opening of places of consumption and the development of risk reduction systems.
On the other hand, she wants better access to care and medicines for all. He is, indeed, “deafening“that global health be subject to the profit laws of certain pharmaceutical companies. Universal access to treatment would make it possible to stop the epidemic, because a patient under treatment does not transmit the virus.
Finally, given that 54% of new cases of HIV in France are foreigners and that half of these people contracted the disease after their arrival in France, AIDES calls for the implementation or development of certain systems. For example, it asks that AME (State Medical Aid) be integrated into the Social Security system or that sick or persecuted foreigners be able to obtain a residence permit.