Eradicating HIV Will Take More Effort Beyond Medicalization or Litigation, The Social Factors Must Not Be Neglected Part 1

Surviving HIV for long comes with different needs and agencies. These are also contexts for intersecting identities. Response by medically trained persons or social workers or even lawyers is quite different. We came in to address the lack of Social Justice Medicine that was missed by the funding policy that promoted cataracted “Human Rights” that upheld a community to court pipeline and was well funded since late 1990s. This missed the community to collective life promoting aspirations pipeline. We came to promote the latter. We were formed as the Good Samaritan Uganda (Good Sam UG) in 1997 to care for Children Living With HIV; over time we worked with male sex-workers and eventually the LGBTIQQ under the SOGI call; later we took up the name Most at Risk Populations’ Society in Uganda and our niche was 5 pronged: Consolidate work with CBOs into a collaborative we call the “Society,” to create contexts and the connective tissue for a collective community ; Connect all beneficiaries living with HIV to ARV Clinics in Uganda; Catalyse engagement in social-economiccultural-gender-related rights approaches to leverage dignity affirmation; address Alcoholism, drug-use and injecting drug use; foster participation in eradication of HIV/TB/Malaria by 2030 for all the 971 CBOs under our ‘society’; and care for 1890 (we currently can trace 1,687 so far) Persons Living With HIV in different districts. For us HIV also means (TB/Malaria/COVID-19/Poverty/Alcoholism/Drug-use) and intersecting identities. Communities must be empowered to address HIV and (TB/Malaria/COVID-19/Poverty/Alcoholism/Drug-use) because these are the Epidemic Shenanigans.