HIV researcher warns US funding cuts ‘catastrophic’
An HIV/AIDS researcher believes South Africans have underestimated the impact of the US funding cuts to the country's health programmes.
President Donald Trump announced that the US was terminating funding for several global health programmes in January.
South Africa was among the affected countries.
The country is one of the beneficiaries of the US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief - known as PEPFAR.
It makes up around 17% of the country's HIV programme budget.
Glenda Gray, a professor of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand and at the Vaccines and Infectious Disease Division, says the first cuts came at the end of January.
" The first programme that stopped was the USAID program that the Multi-African Country Consortium to make an HIV vaccine. We got the termination notice at the end of January, so we still thought that we were going be fine because SAID also had terminated the pitfall funding. So we thought this would be a temporary pause, and while people review the stuff and maybe that funding will come back, but unfortunately, it didn't.
"We started to worry about the funding that we got from the National Institute of Health. Normally, with our funding from the National Institute of Health, we get a notice, what we call a notice of grant award, in March or April. And this award didn't come. And for some people who are also waiting for this award, their grants got terminated."
Gray has been working in HIV/AIDS research for almost two decades, and says this has put the HIV vaccine trials on hold.
She says HIV/AIDS programmes are not the only ones affected.
Gray warns that the impact is going to be catastrophic.
" So there are lots of scientists who work in other areas in cancer, in schizophrenia, in other mental health issues, and also cardiovascular disease, hypertension. So anything that we received from the NIH is on hold in South Africa."
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