World Aids Day 2012

Christy and Adele met in 2006 on a RED trip in Swaziland and have remained close.  Adele’s work with the Global Fund to fight AIDS and her new mother status give her a heartbreaking perspective on why Getting to Zero (this year’s theme for World AIDS Day) is urgent. Here is Adele's story:

A Mother's Perspective From the Frontline

My daughter, Liya, was born in February this year – a precious gift relatively late (biologically speaking) and all the more treasured for it. I became an aunt to my sister’s daughters and my brother’s girl and boy more than ten years ago and have known for a long time that I wanted to have children of my own. Somehow I assumed (despite emphatic “you don’t know what it feels like ‘til you have your own!” statements from friends) that I knew what being a mother would mean, emotionally. 

Of course nothing can prepare you for the primal tug of that kind of love. From the moment of birth, your sense of total wonder at this new life is followed immediately by wanting to infuse this little soul now with joy, contentment, and confidence.  You hope she has intelligence and freedom and the best opportunities, and at the same time you’re taken over by an overpowering compulsion to protect her at all costs from any kind of harm. 

And ‘harm,’ as any new parent knows, comes in countless permutations.  From Liya’s anguish as a hungry newborn before she developed a sense of expectation and could anticipate she’d get her milk, to her pleading cries when she was overtired or had a sore tummy, to the irritation of sore gums when she started teething, to the inevitable bumps on the head when she started sitting (and falling) – I wish I could have spared her all of it.  Yet these are nothing compared to the much more serious issues of real illness, the outrages of violence and other irreversible betrayals that many children experience.

Having worked at the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria for most of the past decade, I have looked at this at a macro level.  I have also seen however, sometimes at close hand, the betrayal of millions of children, who’ve been born with HIV (or infected shortly after birth), because their mothers didn’t have access to the right treatment to prevent their baby’s infection. In the universe of medical interventions, AIDS prevention and treatment is not a complicated or expensive one.  We have the technical know how to do this.  What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the real issue is money. 

The major players in the AIDS epidemic – UNAIDS, the Global Fund, PEPFAR (and countless other smaller, but nonetheless impassioned programs and advocates) - are necessarily making a lot of noise today about this and other HIV-related issues. Last year UNAIDS created a challenge and  new plan for the global community, to specifically address mother-to-child transmission of HIV.  Named the “Countdown to Zero” the plan holds, that by 2015, we can collectively eliminate new HIVinfections among children and keep their mothers alive. 

This goal is achievable, especially considering that the world has actually made great progress in this area: Since 2001, infections among newborns fell 40 percent, from 550,000 to 330,000 per year. 

This is where I put my new-mum hat firmly back on, because, after offering thanks for the health of my gorgeous girl, my heart feels as if it will physically break when I even consider how I would feel if she were one of this year’s 330,000. And every single one of those 330,000 babies has a Mum who feels the same.  Every one of those babies has a future ahead of him or her and far greater challenges in less privileged circumstances than Liya would have if she had to deal with being HIV-positive from birth.

Coming from South Africa (the country with the world’s biggest AIDS epidemic) I  worked at the Fund with (PRODUCT) RED and with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who was our Ambassador from 2009 to 2011 for the protection of mothers and babies against AIDS.  That gave me a different kind of gift: the chance to meet mothers and babies whose lives had been affected by HIV. In many cases, people lives were profoundly changed because of their access AIDS treatment and prevention. In many other cases, however, people would have given anything to have had that opportunity.

On this World AIDS day we’re celebrating the successes in the fight against AIDS over the past decade.  8 million people on antiretroviral treatment is among those successes. As I look back on my experience at the Global Fund, I am holding onto the feelings of the millions of mums and babies who haven’t yet been reached. Every child counts. And every one of their mothers – as well as the mothers of the millions of children who still need pediatric AIDS treatment – has the same right as I do to experience the heart-leaping, untroubled joy I feel when my baby turns to me with a luminous smile.