OCT 27 — The world has spent more than 40 years learning what works in the AIDS response. For the Pacific, with its long tradition of collective action in tackling shared challenges, those hard-won lessons could help prevent today’s growing HIV epidemics from becoming a much larger crisis.
The recent surge of international attention to Fiji’s HIV epidemic has carried uncomfortable echoes of an earlier era of AIDS.
A rapid rise in new infections. A national crisis declaration. Stories of people struggling to access services or staying away because of pervasive stigma. Health systems racing to catch up with an epidemic moving faster than the response. Once again, HIV has made international headlines with an urgency many had hoped belonged to the past.
