Thousands of Red Cross workers hit by AIDS

HIV/Aids is threatening the international Red Cross, with thousands of aid workers hit by the disease, the organisation said in Geneva today.

Launching a new fund to help staff and volunteers get vital drugs, Red Cross official Bernard Gardiner told reporters that fighting HIV/Aids was a question of “organisational survival.”

Gardiner heads the Aids campaign at the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

The federation estimates that around 200,000 of its 97 million employees and voluntary aid workers worldwide are suffering from HIV/Aids, most of them in Africa, where the disease has struck hardest.

Many provide essential care for other sufferers.

“We can’t do our work without keeping these people alive,” Gardiner said.

Africa is home to 29 million of the world’s 40 million people living with HIV - the virus that causes Aids – or the full-blown disease.

“We get our members of staff from the community,” said Tito Fachi, president of the Zambian Red Cross. Like ordinary Africans, few local Red Cross can afford to the life-prolonging anti-retroviral

medicines widely available in wealthier countries.

“As a humanitarian organisation, we can’t afford to keep our hands folded. There’s been a missing link, and that’s treatment within our own organisation,” Fachi added.

The Red Cross Masambo Fund – named after a Zimbabwean aid worker who died of Aids in 2001 – aims to gather enough money initially to start helping 300 people next year. It expects to provide five years’ treatment for sick Red Cross workers.