Turning the Tide: An Open Strategy for a Response to AIDS in the Pacific

The Pacific is a unique and vulnerable region. It spans a third of the world’s surface and accounts for just 0.14% of the world’s population—with a similar proportion of the global burden of HIV. For Pacific countries, even a small number of people living with HIV can translate into high incidence and prevalence rates that can have devastating impacts on individuals, families, communities and economies. These challenges demand greater global attention. Pacific countries are often included in broad Asia–Pacific regional groupings where the magnitude of the problem in Asian countries overshadows the challenges and needs of smaller Pacific countries.

Even the more-developed countries of the region are not immune to significant challenges to human development, compounded in recent times by the global financial crisis. These Pacific realities led to the constitution of the Commission on AIDS in the Pacific in October 2007 to examine the current scale of the HIV epidemic in the region. The Commission also examined how the Pacific’s response has changed over the past decade and how this momentum can be strengthened.