CONNECTING LANGUAGES

Language can be a barrier to prevention, care, and community outreach.  This Australian website has factsheets on HIV/AIDS in 23 different languages.

This Canadian site has information in 10 languages, plus a useful multilingual glossary that might be particularly useful if you are conversant in a language but not in its medical terminology.

Asian Community AIDS Services has information in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Tagalog, all of which are also covered by those previous sites – but they go into much more detail about larger health information such as nutrition, women’s health, and complementary therapies.  They also have factsheets on common opportunistic infections and meds.

For French, the Canadian websites Pret Pour L’Action, Stop Serophobia, and the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange are filled with info.

The National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus website has a page of “Health Information in Multiple Languages.”

For the most common foreign language at FIGHT, let me suggest the wealth of HIV/AIDS information the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has in Spanish.

 

CONNECTING CULTURES

Even if language isn’t a barrier, culture can be.  For health providers dealing with cultural divisions, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health has lots of resources.  It includes

• • Resources to Implement Cross-Cultural Clinical Practice Guidelines For Medicaid Practitioners

• • A quick summary of laws that relate to cultural diversity and medical care

• and much more – check it out!

Georgetown University’s National Center for Cultural Competence has a wide range of original publications on diversity and healthcare, all free online, with such titles as “Bridging the Cultural Divide in Health Care Settings,” “A Guide to Choosing and Adapting Culturally and Linguistically Competent Health Promotion Materials,” and “Public Health in a Multicultural environment.”

For religious differences, TheBody.com has a page on Religion and HIV/AIDS with articles and links organized by religion.

In particular, folks might be interested to read about Islamic practice as it relates to health and healthcare at the website of the World Health Organization.  They also have a page with the full contents of a monograph called The Role of Religion and Ethics in the Prevention and Control of AIDS, also available in Arabic.

CONNECTING CONTINENTS

There’s so much information on HIV/AIDS worldwide that it would be presumptuous of me to try to index it all here.

The University of California, San Francisco’s ever-excellent website HIV InSite has collections of links to articles and resources on global AIDS.  Follow these thinks for:

• • treatment access worldwide

• • care, treatment, and prevention broken down by region and by country

• • treatment in the developing world

• community-based care in the developing world

The United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS website has information including:

• • studies of the epidemic and responses broken down by region and country

• • an assessment of the impact of global HIV/AIDS funding

• • a collection of reports on best practices around the world

• a multimedia section right on their homepage (including a PSA from a couple “footballers”)

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has produced many reports on HIV/AIDS worldwide all available online.  These include their detailed annual reports to Congress, but also intriguing-looking reports on such topics as food security, gender-based violence, refugees, and more – all looking at how these issues intersect with HIV/AIDS.

 

For those who want to learn more about our colleagues around the globe, but don’t have the six months it would take to read through all that information linked above, let me recommend a few particular things.

Featuring just one country, in China a new government study says that AIDS is the top fatal infection in China as of 2008.  The British HIV/AIDS organization AVERT has a good introduction to the epidemic in China, including history and current trends.  You can also read a scholarly assessment of the Chinese government’s free ART program from the journal AIDS.

Featuring just one issue, the global effort to gain access to medicine, the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines and Pharmaceutical Policies page collects information and resources on the subject.  New York’s AID for AIDS’s “drug recycling” program collects unused, HIV-related medications and redistributes them in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Featuring just one organization, Partner’s in Health’s HIV Equity Initiative is one of the most innovative groups working to bring treatment and community-based empowerment to all the citizen’s of the world.  The Miami Herald just published a nice article about their ground-breaking work in Haiti.  Advocacy issues are covered at the page of their sister organization, The Institute for Health and Social Justice.

TRAVELLING WITH HIV/AIDS

Continent can be crossed with bodies, not just web-browsers.  POZ summarizes issues that folks will need to deal with if they “Travel Positively.”  For particular countries, The Global Database on HIV-Related Travel Restriction has an interactive map where you can find information on particular countries including entry and residence regulations, treatment access, and local AIDS Service Organizations.