UNIVERSITY COALITIONS for GLOBAL HEALTH

Youth AIDS Day, February 26 2008

WHAT: Join students all over the U.S. by taking action to increase funding for global HIV/AIDS as part of Youth AIDS Day 2008.As you may know, Congress is considering legislation that would re-authorize the President’s Global AIDS Initiative. As I’ve written before, this is an opportunity to scale up the US response to AIDS and to reform policies like the failed abstinence only earmark.

* Increase funding levels to at least $50 billion
* End the required abstinence-only-til-marriage earmark
* Provide the training and support for urgently needed new healthcare workers
* Integrate women’s health and social services programs
* Address the structural inequalities that leave women vulnerable to HIV/AIDS
* Eliminate the HIV/AIDS travel ban that prohibits people with HIV from entering the United
States

WHEN: February 26th 2008

WHO: This event is being sponsored by a coalition of student organizations including: University Coalitions for Global Health (UCGH); Physicians for
Human Rights (PHR); Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC); Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) ; Americans Medical Student Association (AMSA)

WHY: Of the 2.5 million new HIV infections each year, forty percent are among
people ages 15-24. Myriad social and economic factors increase young people’s vulnerability to infection, and children and adolescents in many places are uniquely affected by the pandemic as they lose a generation of parents, teachers, and doctors. In some regions, youth are ill-equipped to protect themselves, for lack of knowledge about the modes of transmission. Yet young leaders are taking action, effectively changing behaviors, and shaping a better future. On February 26, student organizations all over the US will be taking action on funding for global HIV/AIDS as part of Youth AIDS Day.

Last year’s theme was Our Future, Our Crisis: Universal Access by 2010. Students challenged the political obstacles in the way of achieving this goal and providing treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS in the Global South. They held dozens of actions across the country, including demonstrations and events, to demand immediate change to address inequalities of access. Youth AIDS Day 2008 will see students pushing their political leaders to reauthorize an improved PEPFAR and to allocate the necessary resources- at least $50 billion- for it to effectively continue to fight AIDS around the world.

Global Health Week of Action, March 24-28*

The annual Global Health Week of Action is set for March 24-28th.* We will distribute a Week of Action Organizing Guide with resources for how to plan your events and actions, educational resources, and issue specific action kits. The guide will be posted on our website and distributed to students by March 1st.

*If these dates do not work because of exam or spring break conflicts, please choose the “best” set of dates for your school. We suggest the 1-2 weeks immediately after spring break as the “best” set of dates.

Hi everyone!

I finally have some good news!. The second round of negotiations of the Intergovernmental Working Group for Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) has started! This is where the Ministries of Health and World Health Organization (WHO) are tasked with coming up with a plan of action that addresses the problems to access to medicines – like the high cost of drugs and the lack of R&D into diseases that mostly affect the poor. Michel Lotrowska, Campaigner at MSF’s Access to Essential Medicines Campaign reports:

“We are getting a sense that countries are pushing WHO to be more active in resolving the access to medicines crisis, and take a pro-health approach to intellectual property. And governments are taking steps to address the fundamental reasons why investment into innovation for diseases of the poor is lacking.”

At the core of the plan is finding an optimal way to increase research and development of affordable health care products so people, particularly in developing countries, can get treatment, with an emphasis on neglected diseases and tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Why does this matter? This growing pro-access sentiment is a huge step in the right direction. If the WHO comes out against the unfair free trade policies and patent laws of governments like the U.S., it would be the first major international organization to actively seek resolution to these issues. For years developing nations have been trying to find ways around the intellectual property laws and trade practices that ban the creation of generic medicines and support research and development into diseases that only effect the Western world (because they are the “market”). To learn more about the IGWG and access to medicines check out the work of Essential Action’s Access to Medicines Project.

Hey there global health enthusiasts!

I owe you all a BIG thank you for participating in the poll on the Lancet Student website entitled “What issue would you most like to campaign on?” The results are in and as you can all see, the Right to Health is a straight shot winner followed by Access to Essential Medicines and Strengthening Health Systems as the top three.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, UCGH empowers students to ignite change on global health issues. Each year the UCGH Steering Committee (comprised of representatives from various student global health organizations) gathers to decide the coming academic year campaigns. This year we were blessed to have input from all of you (which seemly made our jobs easier) and based off your voting the Steering Committee has envisioned a new direction of UCGH advocacy.

Rather than arbitrarily choosing three campaigns, the Committee has listened to your voices and now is restructuring UCGH to have a clearly defined advocacy mission that will be the unifying trend between all campaigns. The UCGH advocacy mission will be:

“Through the empowerment of young people, UCGH aims to combat global medical apartheid by ensuring that all people have the right to health as defined by United Nations General Comment 14.”

This new mission allows UCGH to expand its campaigns and incorporate many more student organizations, because General Comment 14 not only calls for access to healthcare, but it also encompasses the underlying environmental, societal and cultural determinants of health. The right to health remained no more than a slogan for more than 50 years, but now General Comment 14 is starting an international movement to obtain quantifiable and measurable standards for the right to health and UCGH wants to join in!

Within this new larger mission, each year the Steering Committee will identify three issues that are crucial for instilling the right to health. This year the Committee has chosen; Access to Essential Medicines, Strengthening Health Systems and Ensuring Health Equity. Each issue allows UCGH to create several different campaigns. For example, under the Health Equity issue UCGH will be advocating for the HIV Prevention Act as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We are unveiling these advocacy approaches this Fall.

Stay posted to hear more about UCGH campaigns!