Reuters – Britain’s Prince Harry said he was “in shock” after quitting as a patron of Sentebale, a British charity he set up to help young people with HIV and AIDS in Lesotho and Botswana, following a row between trustees and the chair of the board.
Harry, the younger son of King Charles, co-founded Sentebale in 2006 in honor of his mother, Princess Diana, nine years after she was killed in a Paris car crash. Sentebale means “forget-me-not” in the local language of Lesotho in southern Africa.
“It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation … ”
Prince Harry’s visa papers have been the subject of a now two-year court battle about his past use of drugs—but in reality there may be more private information than that at stake in the case … READ MORE.
Billions in U.S. funding for HIV treatment are axed
Under Trump, Americans will no longer have to bear the enormous cost for rampant sexual immorality in Africa. – Ed.
SCIENCE.ORG – The decision by President Donald Trump’s administration to cut the vast majority of its foreign aid programs has devastated the global HIV/AIDS effort—and left its leaders seething.
South Africa’s HIV/AIDS program, the world’s largest, has been thrown into turmoil, researchers, clinicians, and advocates said yesterday during an impassioned press conference.
IS HIV A ‘GAY DISEASE’?
“[Homosexuals] are disproportionately at risk for HIV infection. In the United States, the estimated lifetime risk for HIV infection among [homosexual men] is one in six, compared with heterosexual men at one in 524 and heterosexual women at one in 253.” – U.S. CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
And the fate of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which relies on U.S. funds to help track and coordinate the global response, is in jeopardy.
“It is a huge crisis,” says epidemiologist Peter Piot, who ran UNAIDS from its inception in 1995 until 2008 and is now at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Zimbabwe, Zambia, and other hard-hit countries in Africa may soon run out of anti-HIV drugs as a result of the cuts, Piot says.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of State said it was terminating 5800 of 6300 foreign aid contracts issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which the Trump administration has effectively closed down. Many in the global health and development community are still trying to get a complete picture of the damage impact.
There had been some hope that global HIV/AID efforts backed by USAID would be spared. In response to loud protests against the freeze on U.S. foreign aid, announced by Trump on 20 January, the State Department offered waivers to “life-saving” projects 4 days later.
People running such projects complained the waiver program was badly flawed, but they held out hope that funding would be restored after a 90-day review of all foreign aid programs the U.S. government said it would undertake.
This week’s terminations signal that the review has been completed. “The whole story is now over,” said Linda-Gail Bekker, an HIV/AIDS researcher at the University of Cape Town who spoke at the press conference.
For South Africa, which has 8 million people living with HIV and 150,000 new infections each year, the effects could be dramatic.
The country is the largest recipient of USAID’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), receiving $462 million in fiscal year 2023. (PEPFAR, which operates in more than 50 countries, has been credited with saving some 26 million lives since its creation in 2003 under then-President George W. Bush.) …
