Venezuela’s need for antiretrovirals

WHEN Danielis Diaz stopped receiving HIV/Aids drugs four months ago, she had a life or death choice – stay at home and become another lifeless casualty of Venezuela’s crumbling health system, or flee to Colombia.

Today, the 32-year-old transgender woman is about to restart her free antiretroviral medication at the Censurados Foundation, a non-profit HIV/Aids rights group that runs a clinic out of a garage in Colombia’s border city of Cucuta.

Diaz – a hairdresser in the daytime and a sex worker at night – is one of more than 1 million Venezuelans to arrive in Colombia over the past 18 months, driven by economic collapse, growing poverty and severe shortages of food and medicine.

“The doctors would say, ‘Nothing this month, try next month,’” recalled Diaz, who received free medication for 12 years as part of Venezuela’s once-lauded national HIV/Aids treatment programme.

Run by a team of voluntary nurses, social workers and psychologists, the clinic is a lifeline for her and about 45 other Venezuelan migrants, about half of whom are members of the LGBT+ community.

Since 1991, Venezuela has distributed free antiretroviral drugs to fight HIV/Aids. The medication keeps the virus in check, increasing a person’s chances of living a long, healthy life.

But like the rest of the country’s public health system, its treatment programme has fallen apart amid an economic meltdown that has triggered the biggest exodus of people in modern Latin American history.

First the laboratory tests and regular check-ups stopped, then the antiretroviral drugs ceased, and finally specialist doctors left the country, according to Venezuelan migrants living with HIV.

Since 2015, the country’s “complex economic situation” has deprived the health ministry of funds to buy medicine, said Regina Lopez de Khalek, Venezuela manager of UNAids. “This has got worse in the last year. The ministry has not been able to make regular and continued purchase.”

Shortages have hit Venezuela’s LGBT+ community hard, as it is disproportionately affected by HIV.

Earlier this year, and most recently in August, Venezuela bought antiretrovirals through the strategic fund of the Pan American Health Organisation, De Khalek said. Some of that medication has begun to arrive in recent weeks.

For some Venezuelans, such measures have come too late.

According to Juan Carlos Archila, who heads the Censurados Foundation, nine Venezuelans have died of Aids-related illnesses in Cucuta’s main public hospital since January.

Wilson Castaneda, head of the LGBT+ rights group Caribe Afirmativo in the northern coastal city of Barranquilla, said 11 LGBT+ Venezuelans with HIV have died this year alone

Experts warn that irregular treatment could lead to rising levels of drug-resistance.