By VICKI SMITH - Associated Press Writer - Associated Press
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
AIDS activists dressed in black, banging drums and carrying a small cardboard coffin marched through downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday, demanding the world's most powerful leaders stop using the global economic crisis as an excuse to cut promised funding for drugs and treatment.
"Medication for every nation!" more than 100 protesters shouted as they snaked around the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, where the Group of 20 will convene Thursday. "Pills cost pennies. Greed costs lives!"
Led by ACT UP Philadelphia, Black Radical Congress of Pittsburgh, New York's AIDS Housing Network and several other groups, protesters pressured President Obama to make good on a campaign pledge to commit $50 billion over five years to AIDS efforts.
Protesters say the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria faces a $5 billion U.S. shortfall, and Obama's 2010 budget doesn't increase allocations.
Some African nations are already running out of key drugs, protesters say, and some clinics are taking people off HIV treatment for lack of funding.
The march stopped periodically so HIV-positive participants like the Rev. Jeffrey Jordan, of ACT UP Philadelphia, could share their stories. The pastor of Metropolitan Community Church said he is tired of presiding at funerals. He has buried 13 members of his congregation in 15 years and regularly presides over funerals for other AIDS victims.
"Just because there is a depression, we cannot stop," he said. "Three million people a year are dying of AIDS and we need to make sure that funding goes forward. ... Only 74 percent of the people with AIDS in the world that are living get the proper medication, and that's a sad number.
"I wake up every morning and I take my drugs," Jordan said. "That's a tool that God has given man to sustain my life, and I think about the people in the other countries who, because of the blessed penny, are not on their medications.
"It's time to stop funding death and start funding life."
